


hold me fast and fear me not

by wastrelwoods



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: At Long Last, Fairy Tale Elements, Intercrural Sex, Kidnapping, Riddles, but in a sexy way. listen. its tam lin, fairy fucking....inadvisable but extremely worth it, general fantastical eldritch horror, i just like to look at sci fi and ask "but what if it was fantasy too", space fairies, tam lin au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2019-10-20 01:26:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 34,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17612813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/wastrelwoods
Summary: There’s something unsettling about the tilt of his head, the slight flicker in those shining eyes, the way the shape of his face shifts in the neon light like it isn’t quite solid. Something Other.“You’re the thief,” Juno says. The fairy's jagged, knifelike grin only goes sharper at the corners.“And you, from that tone, must be the thief-taker."





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [howlikeagod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/gifts).



> hey. sometimes you just have to vague about a fic you want to write for a year and eventually things will work out. love and thanks to sarah for trusting that this thing would literally ever be published, and also for putting up with me being ominous about my gay little plans and schemes. happy birthday dear!! 
> 
> i will slap specific content warnings in chapter notes when they're applicable! expect updates....more or less weekly?

**[prologue: twenty-one years ago]**

 

Space is cold, and space is quiet, but space is far from empty. 

The asteroids are spread out in a lazy ring a hundred miles across, orbiting, it seems, nothing in particular. For a landmark that technically breaks the laws of physics, it’s a very unassuming sight. Any passing interstellar flight would probably notice the armada surrounding the ring of stones long before they bothered about the strangeness of the floating rocks themselves. A swarm of ships so dark that their blackness is what sets them apart from the landscape of void, their wings jutting out into empty space like teeth.

“Come here, thief.”

The Queen stands on a balcony overlooking the largest chamber of the largest ship in the fleet. Her silver hair is cropped close to her face, and her crown and mantle are all stars and shadows. She should be beautiful, but she isn’t. She doesn’t look human enough for the word. Only strange and icy and slightly nauseating. Like there’s something hiding under her skin.

The thief who joins her looks uneasy at the prospect of standing too close. The detached, professional mask of his face is belied by the fear in his dark eyes. He’s young. More boy than man, really.

“What are they orbiting?” he asks, looking out at the ring of stones visible through the glass. 

She smiles, and it twists her cold face in a way that turns his stomach. “They aren’t orbiting anything. It’s only a sign to mark the crossroads.”

“Ah.” He has more questions, but it’s safer, probably, not to ask them. 

The chamber below the pair is filling slowly with a parade of silent, winged figures who flicker in and out of sight at strange intervals. Like the boy, they’re uniformed and blank-faced. Beautiful in their eeriness.

After the horde of figures in their dark court dress comes a man all in white, dripping with diamonds and sapphires, crowned in shining gold. The boy looks at him in awe; forgetting, for a moment, to be afraid. 

The rest of the parade falls back, and the figure in white makes a lonely march up the gangway. The thief leans forward over the balcony, pushing up onto his toes to see more clearly as a second layer of glass begins to lower, cutting the man in white off from the rest of the crowd. 

One of the Queen’s papery hands reaches out to brush aside a lock of the boy’s dark hair, and she turns her empty smile on him. A tender gesture made perfectly clinical. “Someday, Peter Nureyev,” she tells him, with something like glee in her raspy voice. “That will be you.” 

He flinches as he hears the low roar of the outer glass layer melting away. The man in white rises into the darkness, glittering like a star for one shining, glorious moment before he crosses into the space between the ring of stones and the light is snuffed out.


	2. 1. the neptunian hawkmoth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juno picks a rose, and meets a monster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ooooh we in it now......ooh its time
> 
> cw: canon-typical references to childhood abuse  
> cw: mildly dubious consent - see end notes

When Juno was five years old, his mother hid his name and wrapped an iron chain around his neck. “The galaxy’s a mean place,” she would say. “It wants nothing more than to eat you up and spit out your bones. You can’t trust it. You should never, ever trust it for a second.” 

As far as he can remember, it’s the one piece of advice from her he ever took to heart. The one drop of her poison he swallowed and allowed to infect him, warp him, rot him away from the inside. Thirty-three years down the line, that chain still digs into the nape of his neck, chafing under the collars of his shirts. That poison’s kept him alive well past his expiration date.

A lot of people in Hyperion wear the iron. A lot of the people in a lot of the places this corner of the galaxy, not just the good old City of First Light. Out along the rim, so they say, people found new lives and new superstitions and new ways of keeping the sucking void of space from swallowing them up. But this close to Earth, people remember the Others. 

Juno twists idly at the pendant hanging down over his chest, and scratches out another note in the margins. The file’s hanging half off his desk, papers scattered at every angle over the surface, coffee rings obscuring dates and names he’ll have to ask Rita to recopy in the morning and will probably forget to deal with when all is said and done. Refracted neon light pours in the half-shut window, colors shifting and blurring with the billboards outside. He can feel a headache coming on. 

He glares down at the tiny, slanted print on the page, the curves of letters shifting from left to right the longer he stares, punctuation jumping around like the words have a personal vendetta against Juno understanding a single goddamn thing they’re saying. He rubs at his eye and feels half-congealed blood flake away from a gash on his cheek. 

Most of the time when someone mentions the Others by name they’re telling a story. Mom used to love that kind more than anything, would take it in turns whether she was warning them not to go out at night because the monsters who lived in the void between the stars would steal them away and eat their hearts. Whether she was spinning a wonderful tale about a fairy woman with golden eyes who could turn back time with a dance. Making the Others seem by turns alluring and evil, beautiful and dangerous. 

She had another story, too, to answer a childish curiosity about why he had a brother who looked just like him, when none of the other kids at school did. A story about putting one baby to bed and wandering away to the office to work, and returning an hour later to find two in its place. 

It varied, over the years, whether she would accuse Juno or Ben of being the copycat. He wasn’t sure she even remembered it was only a story in the end. 

Juno’s met Others before. They don’t mingle with humans much, but in a place like Hyperion where traps are laid on every street corner, where danger lingers in every shadow...fey thrive. Mostly they cling to those shadows and let the system do the dirty work for them, but a few of the bolder ones have figured out how to play the game from the inside. They’re starring on the streams, or sitting pretty in the laps of druglords with intergalactic pharma empires, or in the mayor’s office. Running the city like a court away from court. 

Juno’s met them. Juno’s worked with them. Hell, a few of them he could even admit to liking, if you softened him up with a few good hits to the head first. Doesn’t change the odds that when Juno finally ends up in a pine box with a fistful of earth sprinkled over the top, it will be a fairy who puts him there. 

All of which is to say that there’s a familiar pattern to these robberies, and Juno doesn’t like the look of it. 

Juno winds the iron chain over and over and lets go, watches it spin, and pours himself a drink.

*

To catch a thief, the old adage goes, you have to think like a thief. Idioms aren’t a practical way to go about actual real-life detective work, but every strategy breaks down somewhere, in a case that’s dragged on as long as this one has, and sooner or later you end up going back to basics. 

You have to think like a thief. Everyone’s heard the saying before, which is why Juno’s pretty sure Hollis Carter will be willing to hear him out if any pressing concerns come up about spending his evening crawling through the ventilation system of the mansion he’s being paid to guard. 

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” he whispers roughly, shuffling forward on hands and knees and narrowly avoiding cracking his skull against the ceiling again. 

“Oh, it’s a classic, Mistah Steel,” Rita croons in his earpiece. “This is just how they did it in _The Neptunian Hawkmoth_. The remake, I mean, not that dusty old miniseries. Creepin’ in in the dead of night and snatchin’ the statue before the bad guys get the chance, ooh, boss, isn’t this _exciting_?”

“Sure, yeah.” Sometimes it was better just to let her get it out of her system, or something. “Rita, we’re not after a statue, you know that, right?” He holds his breath and winces before bending nearly in half to start turning a corner. 

“No, the moth statue’s in the _movie_ , Mistah Steel, you’re gettin’ it all confused.”

Juno just grunts, shifting his weight in a way that makes his knee start to twinge painfully and then hastily reconfiguring. “Okay, how’s it looking?”

“Like a one-gal game of twister.”

“Rita--”

“You’re going the right way, boss, I can see the greenhouse just up ahead, maybe twenty more feet. Alarms on all the doors and pressure sensors in the floor, but I bet I can take care of that if you give me another minute to finish recording all the streams I’m missing for this.”

“Yeah,” Juno grunts, crawling forward on hands and knees until he reaches the faint light shining through the grille. “Great, yeah, take all the time you need. Not on a deadline here or anything--”

Rita presses a few buttons and starts typing in pointed silence, and Juno drops it. The grille looks flimsy enough, bolted down at the corners but no great obstacle to remove. Easier, probably, if he’d thought far enough ahead to bring a wrench, but he’s always been more of an improviser. He twists around and jams his boot against the panel, which gives a satisfying loose rattle. 

“Alright,” Rita chimes in, a moment later. “That oughta do it, boss, you’re clear to--”

Juno’s drawing his foot back to kick the grille again when the metal underneath him groans and buckles. “Ah, shit,” he says, with feeling, before it caves in entirely and sends him crashing through the ceiling in a hail of plaster and splintered glass. 

Juno hits the floor hard enough to turn half his body into one big bruise, and coughs out dust, and lets out a long, breathless groan. The pressure sensors don’t seem to take any notice, though, which is nice. 

Somewhere, a red light starts flashing. From the ground, Juno watches with a resigned air.

The greenhouses in Carter’s mansion are half the size of Juno’s whole apartment block, with more plant life per square foot than anywhere else on Mars. Whole trees rooted into the tile floor, branches spreading out across the frosted glass dome of the main chamber. Flowers in every color Juno’s ever seen and a few that he hasn’t, each sporting a neat label and description on a marble plaque. He walked through the room in daylight, a week ago, when Carter first offered him the job. 

The darkness makes it loom a little more ominous now than before. All the branches look like clawed hands, and the heady reek of a thousand blossoms from a hundred planets blends together into a disorienting sickly-sweet bouquet that stinks worse than a mortuary. 

“Boss, are you okay in there? That sounded bad.” 

“Fine,” he manages, staggering upright by degrees and brushing himself off. “For the record? This was a mistake.” 

Rita hums through a mouth full of peanut butter and tortilla chip sandwich. “It did look a lot more dashing in the movie. Less...y’know, falling. But it got you inside, right?” 

“So would the door,” he grumbles, and limps over to the rose bushes. 

The pride of Hollis Carter’s collection is demarcated with a little red velvet cord, the little marble plaque proclaiming the current listing price per each bloom in millions of creds, because the idiot is actually begging to be robbed. 

Juno’s never going to see the check for this contract, which is an inevitability and a damned shame. But after three months of chasing shadows and always ending up two steps behind, Juno’s not in it for the money. He just needs to win. Just one time. Might even make him feel better.

He grimaces, and reaches down to wrap his fingers around the bright gold flower and snap it off the bush. It doesn’t come without a fight, one stray thorn digging into his thumb as he pulls. “Ow, damnit,” he mutters as he tucks the rose away.

From behind him, Juno registers a single, soft footfall. “Mind the thorns, they’re sharp.” 

At first all Juno sees of him is a flash of teeth. Stark white, stretched into a wide grin. Like something out of a nightmare, a monster on the prowl, only visible in the second before it pounces. Then he steps more fully into the light, and he’s only a man. 

Or maybe not only. His face is round and soft and his dark eyes shine bright behind a pair of thick-framed glasses. His hair, styled artfully back, falls in a gentle wave over his forehead. His lips are thin and soft and painted crimson. But there’s something unsettling about the tilt of his head, the slight flicker in those shining eyes, the way the shape of his face shifts in the neon light like it isn’t quite solid. Something Other. 

“You’re the thief,” Juno says--blurts, really, but who’s counting? For a split second after he runs his mouth off he thinks about regretting it. But the jagged, knifelike grin only goes sharper at the corners. 

“And you, from that tone, must be the thief-taker,” he says, in a half-laughing voice that makes all the hair stand up on Juno’s neck. “Let’s not make hasty judgements. Which one of us came in through the door, hmm?” 

“The hell you did,” Juno scoffs. “I’ve had eyes on that door all night. You don’t just walk through it, you need keys, you need codes. There’s less security on most bank vaults.”

“I’m very good.” He doesn’t stop moving, brushing aside trailing vines as he walks, eyes roaming up and down Juno like he wants to swallow him whole. “And I’m a guest, I’ll have you know. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t invited.” 

The iron chain burns cold on the back of his neck. Juno suppresses a shiver, and mirrors the stranger’s movement with a cautious step backward. “Yeah, that...tracks.” 

“You, though.” Refracted starlight plays over the curve of his neck through the frosted glass ceiling. “Skulking around in the dead of night, looking for thieves, when I don’t believe that rose in your hand belongs to you.” 

“Get your own.” 

“Then I think it’s safe to say the both of us ought not be in this garden.” He takes a step closer, and Juno takes another step away. “In my experience, that means this qualifies as an impasse.” 

“I really don’t think it does.” 

The stranger halts, mid-step, cocks his head to one side. “I’m sorry, I never caught your name.” 

Juno narrows his eye. “Yeah, well, I never offered it.” 

From Juno’s pocket, there’s a quiet beeping noise, and Rita’s familiar voice, muffled through fabric. “I dunno who you’re talking to there, Boss, but we got trouble. Hurry it up and get out of there, Mx. Carter’s awake and coming your way!”

Both of their gazes snap to the sound, and then drift slowly back to the other’s face, and then to the hallway opening into the opposite end of the greenhouse, where faint footsteps are beginning to echo. 

Juno takes one step toward the door, and the thief matches him, stepping sideways into his path with a raised brow. Gritting his teeth, Juno stills, and tries to move around him, but he moves quicker than Juno can decide which way to turn, shifting and dancing as light on his feet as if he’s never touched the ground before. After a few fruitless attempts, Juno groans and throws up his hands. “It’s a goddamn impasse, fine! What do you want?” 

“Just a favor,” the fairy simpers.

“I’m not as stupid as I look.”

“Alright.” He grins like he expected nothing less. “A trade, then.” 

Juno glances over his shoulder, sees a light blink on in that distant hallway. “I’m listening.” 

“I disappear now and let you make good your little escape,” the stranger says, and cocks his head. “But first, you give me a kiss.” 

“A _what_.”

The stranger laughs a laugh like bells, face shining with unearthly beauty. “Nothing untoward, I promise.” When Juno doesn’t move, he shrugs, “Or we could take it in turns explaining to your client what the both of us are doing here, I suppose, if you don’t feel up to trusting me.” 

“I don’t,” Juno snaps, then sighs, and takes a step closer. “And I don’t have time for this,” he grumbles, taking the thief by the collar and dragging him down until their lips meet. 

It feels like the slow rumble of a thunderstorm, a pounding he can feel in the soles of his feet matched by the pounding of his heart. A wave of potential energy surges up his spine and down through the tips of his fingers, and he shivers as strong hands catch at his coat, pulling him deeper into the kiss and then slipping away just as it feels like he’s about to be pulled under. It’s a hell of a kiss.

Juno stumbles back, and brushes a hand over his coat pocket, and huffs out a breathless laugh. “Give it back.” 

“Give what--” The handcuff clicks shut, and the fairy pulls back to see his wrist chained to the doorknob with a look of honest surprise. “Well. That’s…”

“Don’t let me rush you,” he says, listening to the distant whirring of the door locks. 

A smaller, softer grin plays over the fairy’s face, and he inclines his head, offering his other hand to Juno with the rose clutched in it. “Fair’s fair,” he says, with little of the icy fury Juno’s come to expect from a fey beaten at their own game. “It’s more your color than mine.” 

Juno takes his prize, and reaches for the key, but the stranger winks and fades into a shadowy mist, leaving a lingering scent like a cologne from some distant planet, and a faint tingle on Juno’s lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: mildly dubious consent - A brief instance where Juno is pressured to give Peter a kiss as a form of payment. Sometimes...things that are flirty and fun in fiction can be uncomfortable and scary in real life!


	3. 2. shibazuke roll

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rita and Steel Investigations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: kidnapping

“So what is it? What does it do? Grant wishes? Is it some kind of weapon? I mean, it’s gotta be poisonous or something, right?”

Rita takes a long, contemplative slurp from her iced tea, and sets it down to continue dunking her pretzel inside. “I dunno, Boss, it kinda just looks like a regular old flower to me.”

“But it’s gold!” Juno says. “I mean, what’s that about? That’s not a normal...flower color, is it?” He perches backwards over the other chair and leans in to get a closer look. On the desk between them, the rose is wilting slightly in a few inches of water at the bottom of a chipped coffee mug with a half-peeled-away decal of some kid’s cartoon on the side. It’s not even glowing ominously. 

“Lots of flowers are all sorts of colors, Mistah Steel,” Rita intones wisely. “I think it’s just your basic one and a half million cred rose you got there. Real pretty, but--”

“So it’s not magic?”

“--Not magic,” Rita repeats, around the last of her sweet-tea-soaked snack. 

“Well, then, why was he after it?”

“Why was who what?”

Juno grits his teeth. “The--you know! _fairy_ , the one I told you--”

Rita hums, a knowing grin curling over her face. “Oh,” she says. “You mean the _fairy_.”

“Shut up.” 

“Whatever you say, Boss,” she says primly. “I have no idea why any mysterious, tall, handsome magic alien burglars would try to steal this super normal flower with no magic at all, but if you _want_ me to do a little research…” 

“Whatever you can find,” he says, seizing the lifeline, dropping the coffee-stained file in front of her. “I’ve been tracking these thefts all across the city, Rita, and I still can’t figure out what they have in common. He’s collecting something, and there must be a deadline because the break-ins are getting more frequent. More careless, too, if last night was any indication.” 

“Uh-huh,” Rita agrees, still looking pointedly over the rim of her glasses at Juno in a way she might think is very subtle. She taps at the paper file with one acrylic nail, and wrinkles her nose. “I didn’t hear the magic word in there anywhere, you know.”

Juno scrubs a hand over his face and leans back in his chair. “Rita.” 

She shrugs, already starting to flip through the file. “Mmhmm, I know, I just remember we made a little resolution about working on bein’ more polite to each other, is all.”

“Fine, then, _please_.” One of the troubles of only having the one eye is that rolling his eyes no longer has quite the same effect. “How’s that for you?”

Rita beams, no longer even looking up from her screen, and begins typing away steadily, “Sure, you bet, that was very good of you to ask so nicely, Boss, I’ll get right on it. Thanks again for the pretty flower!”

“It’s not a g--”

“Shh, not right now, Mistah Steel, I got a lot of work to do.” 

Juno grunts and leaves her to it, shaking his head with a badly concealed fondness as he shrugs on his coat. 

*

_This is Rita of Steel and Rita Investigations! Sorry I can’t take your call right now, probably because I got an important Mystery to solve, or my comms is outta juice, or the whole city’s about to be blown apart by a bunch of flying lizard robots! Anyway, you’re welcome in advance for saving the day, and for now just go ahead and leave me a message and I’ll get back to you, okay? Bye!_

There’s a tuneless beep, and Juno sighs, adjusting his earpiece. “Rita, hey. You make any progress on that thing I asked about this morning? Am I calling back too soon? I can never tell how long this kind of stuff takes. Anyway, I’m heading to Strong’s place to see if she knows anything. I promise not to go diving into any tunnels or disappearing without a trace, okay? Just a regular business meeting. Thing.” 

The call trails off. Juno frowns at the unfamiliar silence that follows.

*

The tuneless beep startles him out of a spell of vague melancholy. “Rita, I’m at that sushi place you recommended, you want me to bring anything back for you? Strong said this was the first she’s heard of any of this, so I guess we’re on our own.” 

He pauses, looking over the menu without really seeing a single word on it, worrying idly at the iron chain around his throat. “Did you, uh, get my last message? Didn’t show up as received. I guess it’s been a while since the last Planet of Love marathon cut without commercial breaks was streaming, so if that’s what this is...listen, Rita, this case...I feel like I have to get to the bottom of it. Feels like it’s building to something. Something bad. So if you could, uh. Please. Let me know what you find. And I’ll see you soon, I guess.” 

*

Juno sees the first faint curl of smoke under the door from the empty stairwell and stops in his tracks. “What the hell?”

It might be strange but innocuous enough, if not for the icy chill that runs down his spine as he approaches. Juno might not have much in the way of common sense, but he’s got intuition in spades. He tucks the spare order of shibazuke rolls away and reaches for his gun.

The smoke gets thicker, a rolling lilac-tinted fog that hisses as it pours into the hallway, and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it dissipates. Juno runs for the office door and throws it wide open, abandoning caution. “Put your hands up, I’m armed and I’m--”

The room is empty. “--the only one here,” he finishes, lamely. 

Juno clicks off the safety on his blaster and stalks a wide circle around the office, checking under desks and behind shelves and the still-flickering plasma screen playing out muted commercials. He slides open the inner door to his office and checks there too. Untouched. None of the windows have been forced, and all his files are scattered over the floor just where he left them. 

Except, well….

He glances back over his shoulder at Rita’s desk. No file, and no flower, which doesn’t have to mean what Juno’s overactive imagination says it means. But a lady should be allowed a little paranoia in a line of work where they really are out to get him most of the time. 

“Where’d you go, Rita?” he mutters. 

The sunset, blue through the dome, casts a fragmented, filtered cold light over the room, and something on the desk shimmers. Juno takes a step close, and then another, until the shimmer solidifies into a solid disk of volcanic glass the size of a ten-cred coin. There are markings on its surface, but not ones he understands. Not even words, probably. 

It’s exactly the kind of mysterious, unassuming tchotchke he should know better than to pick up when he finds it lying around. He does it anyway. It’s ice cold. 

Over his shoulder, the plasma screen flickers, and the sound crackles back to life before warping into a woman’s voice, hoarse and soft. “--Hello, Detective.” 

Juno turns. One of the new Kanagawa projects is streaming, a group of celebrity judges armed with throwing knives facing down a series of increasingly jumpy performers. The mismatched audio drones over it, out of sync. “You took something I wanted,” the new voice hisses. “So I took something from you. It doesn’t feel nice, does it?”

The little disk burns in Juno’s palm, cold enough to blister his skin. He closes his hand over it into a fist, and sinks down into the chair. “What?” he croaks, head spinning. 

“Don’t get underfoot, and we can call this even. Fair’s fair.” Juno snaps to attention, and the screen flickers brighter for a second before going dark with a fizzle and a loud snap. The voice lingers a moment longer, hovering like smoke in the air. “But if you get between me and what I want again, I’ll pluck out your other eye.” 

“Where’s Rita? What did you do to her?” he demands of the echoing silence. “Goddamnit, wait!”

But there’s no reply. 

_Fair’s fair_. He reaches for his iron chain without thinking, and twists the pendant around one finger. This is bad.


	4. 3. fair's fair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Juno's going to find what he's searching for, he'll need all the help he can get.

“I need your help,” he begins, all in a rush, and winces. “Damnit. No, play it cool, Steel, or you’re asking her to bleed you dry. I thought we should...catch up? It’s been a while. And I have...a case. That I was hoping you could….help me with? Pretty please? Goddamnit. Shit.” 

He kicks at the mirror and examines the bags under his eyes with a grimace. “I am so fucked.” 

“Mister Steel?” Kit’s muffled voice sounds from outside. “Vicky’s waiting.” 

Juno groans. “Yeah, just gimme a second,” he calls, running the bathroom sink just to watch the water spill down the drain. “I gotta…powder my nose.” 

It’s been a year since the last time a case had sent him crawling back to the Valley with his tail between his legs, and Juno can’t say he missed it much. There’s good memories in the air in this place, memories of beautiful people in next to nothing smiling at him and handing him another drink. Memories of drifting blissfully through a numb haze until the money ran dry. It’s an establishment that really knows how to drag you back again. 

But working for Vicky had been...rough, at the best of times. She was good at bargains, and loopholes, and bargains with loopholes. And why shouldn’t she be? She’d learned from the best. 

Juno’s got other memories of the Valley, too, like last year, when the former joint owner had appeared to try and cash in on a contract Vicky made with her a full decade earlier, and she’d brought a knife along. A lot of Juno’s relationships have ended on lousy terms, but he can’t say he’s ever spurned a pixie and ended up with a knife to the throat. So far, at least. He’s only thirty-nine, there’s still time. 

He splashes water over his face, and prays that Vicky doesn’t have another murderous ex waiting in the wings to throw Juno at. Not tonight. “Here goes nothing,” he grumbles, and follows Kit. 

Vicky’s on a call again when Juno slinks into her supply closet of an office, but he doesn’t hear a word of it, shoulders tensed and hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, worrying at the little disk of black glass. After a second, he registers that she’s ended her conversation and turned her attention to him. “Jesus, Steel, sit down already, you look like hell.” 

“I--”Juno opens his mouth to recite his practiced lines and comes up short, half falling into the chair and clenching his jaw. Giving in. “Need your help. Please.”

Vicky’s eyebrows shoot up. “No shit,” she breathes. “This have something to do with the fact that the goddamn Queen of Fairies put out a hit on you yesterday?” She leans back in her chair. “Because if you’re bringing that kind of trouble to my doorstep, you know you’re paying double.” 

“I didn’t--” he says reflexively, swallows his surprise. “Think it went all the way to the top. I just need a way in, I have to find--”

“You’re antagonizing them? Steel, look at me. Look at my face. Hear me when I say that you’ve had some pretty piss-poor ideas in your day, and that is the worst idea i’ve ever heard.” 

Juno tastes bile on his tongue. “I don’t have a choice, okay?”

“Yeah, well, I do, and I’m not getting involved in this. That’s what I’m choosing to do. I got a wife and a kid, doll, I got family.” She leans back in her chair, runs a hand through her slicked-back hair. “Christ. Listen, you saw what Ingrid almost did to this setup I got, working all by herself. I’m not messing with the damn Solar Court.”

“It’s Rita,” he says, feels his chest compress like a bellows. 

Vicky goes still, and looks him over with her keen eyes. “Your friend? The Others take her?” She doesn’t wait for the answer she can already read in his face. “I’m sorry to hear that. I really am.” She looks away, messes with the lapels on her jacket and brushes her fingers over the gold band on her left hand. “But it doesn’t change my answer.” 

“Goddamnit, I just need--” Juno’s voice breaks, and he slumps further into himself, anger bursting like a balloon. “No, you’re right. I’ll...find something else.” He flashes a weak smile. “Probably couldn’t afford you anyway, Vick.” 

She huffs out a laugh that sounds more like a sigh. “Glad you understand. Hey, Kit, get the lady a drink on his way out, alright?” 

Juno takes his cue to stand, trying not to feel like he’s sinking into sand with every step. Just as he reaches the door, Vicky chimes in again. “Good luck, Steel. You’re gonna need it.” 

“Yeah.” He wraps his fingers around the disk in his pocket again, turning it over in his hand. “Don’t I know it.”

Kit smiles her professional smile and pours him something off the top shelf with a sultry wink. Juno takes it with a sigh and tips her a few creds, not in the mood to stick around and watch her find a place to tuck away the bills at the moment. 

He slouches back through the ornate halls of the Vixen Valley with his head hanging low, paying more attention to the weave of the carpet than the beautiful people buzzing around him, until he runs directly into one. 

The man he collides with makes a surprised sound as their feet tangle and the both of them lose balance simultaneously, pitching to the floor in an uncoordinated jumble. Juno’s complimentary drink flies out of his hand and he lands hard. “Shit, sorry,” he grunts, picking himself up with the intention of getting out of range before the guy has time to think about swinging a punch. “I’ll just...be out of your hair--”

Juno turns to run, slips his hand back into his pocket, and comes up empty. 

Cursing, Juno turns back again. 

The fairy thief from Carter’s greenhouse dusts himself off and winks at Juno, holding out the little circle of black glass with a knowing grin. “I think you dropped something,”

 

*

 

Juno’s being ushered out of the hall and into a shadowed corner of a private dance room before he gets half a chance to protest, unwilling to make a scene but feeling just desperate and wrong-footed enough to get a little reckless and follow. From the smug expression on the fairy’s face, he was hoping as much. He slips behind the curtain and tosses his coat over the chaise longue with a flourish, glancing back at Juno all the while like he thinks he has a captive audience. Juno wishes he was wrong. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” 

“In this fine ladies and gentlemen's club, you mean?” he says, perching on the edge of the sofa with a raised brow. “Would you prefer all the sordid details, or a more general survey of my evening, hmm?”

Juno folds his arms. “You aren’t here for the vixens, don’t expect me to believe that,” he snaps. 

“Oh, the renards, please,” he says with a handwave and a wink. “But no, not tonight. You and I are familiar with both of the businesses that operate out of this charming establishment, dear, do let’s be honest with each other about that much.”

“You’re here to see Vicky.” 

“Originally,” he agrees. “Now, it seems, I’m here to see you instead.”

“What?”

The fairy doesn’t deign this with a response. Instead, he leans back into the chaise longue and blinks so his irises go flat gold and the little black disk seems to almost hover in his palm where he holds it, turning it over and over. “This is an interesting little toy,” he trills. “How did you come across a thing like this, hmm?” 

“Old family heirloom,” Juno says warily.

A peal of laughter bursts from his red-lipped mouth. “Of course. Ah, I admire you, Detective. Lying’s a rare talent. Not everyone can manage it. Certainly it’s a skill beyond my own capabilities.” 

His smile is wide and white and razor-sharp, like those pearly teeth are a whisper away from sinking into Juno’s throat. Juno narrows his eye. “Are you here to kill me, or what?” 

“Would you like me to kill you?” the fairy asks, demurely. “You’ve caught me unprepared, but I like to think I can be very flexible.” 

He feels his face heat despite his best efforts and tries to keep his expression safely on the surly side of neutral. “So where is she?” he snaps, changing the subject.

“Who?”

“You know damn well who.” Juno stalks forward and all but pins him against the chaise. The fairy doesn’t flinch, offering him a nonplussed glance and crossing one very long leg over the other. “My fr--my secretary. The one you kidnapped.” That gets him a pout and a sigh, but no answer. “I swear, if you hurt her….”

In the blink of an eye, the fairy disappears, and Juno stumbles forward awkwardly. There’s that same lingering smell as the last time he vanished into thin air, and a sound like shifting sand, and Juno whirls around to see the thief reappear a foot away, between him and the door, eyes narrowed and still shining gold. “Is that any way to start a negotiation, I ask you?” 

Juno clenches his jaw, looks him up and down and tries not to lose focus following the line of his long, slender legs all the way to the stiletto of his heel. “She had nothing to do with this, okay? Whatever vendetta you have, it’s between you and me.” 

“Detective, I’m afraid I haven’t the first clue what you mean. If I had--as you say, a _vendetta_ \--against you, you’d be dead already.” 

“Oh, that’s very comforting, thanks,” Juno snaps. 

The fairy crooks a smile that looks fonder than it should, and flips the little disc like a coin. “So what is it you’re looking for? A secretary?” 

Juno ignores him, tired of being talked around in circles, and sits on the chaise lounge. “You work for the Solar Court, right? I mean, it makes sense. I interrupt the Carter job and walk away with the prize you were there to steal, and three days later the Queen herself is breathing down my neck, and my best...researcher turns up missing, along with all the leads I’ve managed to scrape together in the last three months. I’m not such an idiot that I can’t put that much together. It all comes back to you.”

The fairy looks steadily at Juno with his bright, unnerving eyes. “You really know how to make a man feel special,” he croons. “I’m flattered, darling.” 

It’s a cheap tactic, and miserably effective on Juno, who feels his face heat and hates himself for it immediately. “I just,” he says, teeth gritted. “Want to know what I have to do to get Rita back. I know the stories. There’s always a...a trade, or a test, or something.” 

“I’m afraid,” comes the soft reply, “That deals of that kind are rarely so straightforward. I didn’t take your Rita, and therefore I have no power to return her to you even if we could reach an agreement.” When Juno answers this with a glare, the fairy sighs. “Oh, please. As you said, you know the stories. I could never lie to you, dear.”

“You would if you could, and that’s all that matters to me.” 

A surprised peal of laughter bubbles from his throat. “Well, then, I’ll be brief, shall I?” He paces the edge of the room and stalks closer, resting his hip against the side of the chaise and leaning forward. “I can’t return your friend to you, but I can be persuaded to bring you to her. I’m sure even a brazen thief-taker like yourself wouldn’t dream of crossing the wall without a guide.” 

“What,” Juno sneers, but his mind is already racing. Crossing the wall. Crossing the damn _wall_. It’s a plan so spectacularly idiotic he’s honestly surprised he hadn’t thought it up already. March right into the monster’s den all chained up to his own personal monster, with no guarantees and no backup and no weapons worth a damn. 

Could be fun, in a twisted, suicidal kind of way. 

“You?” he echoes, finally, glancing up to meet that piercing gaze. “Why should I trust you?” 

The fairy smiles a thin, soft smile. “It’s easy enough to do.” His voice is low and even and musical, and the flickering light plays off his angular face like something out of a daydream. Juno leans into it despite himself, swaying forward imperceptibly, and feels cold when the fairy pulls away abruptly. “But I suppose if you’re looking for a convincing reason I can’t give you one. Just an offer.” 

Juno sits in silence and listens to the muffled sound of violins and polite, inane conversation somewhere nearby. The Valley’s the perfect place to make a bad bargain. He knows that much from experience. 

And hell, isn’t he out of options anyway? 

“You’ll take me to Rita, and you won’t get in the way of me bringing her back home. I really don’t care what you do after that.”

“I’ll be beside you all the way, you ought to specify that. Be careful, someone might take advantage.”

Juno feels ice cold with dread, but he presses on. “No delays. And no leading me in circles.”

“Of course not,” he agrees magnanimously, and looks Juno over, and tilts his head. “Payment to be negotiated at a later date.” 

“No way in hell.”

“Those are my terms, Detective. Take them or leave them.” 

Juno grits his teeth again, and squares his shoulders, and reaches up to pull the pendant out from under his collar. The chain pulls at the back of his neck as he holds it out. “You know what this is?”

“You mean jewelry?” The fairy says. “I believe I’m familiar with the concept--”

“Cold iron,” Juno explains. “Good old planetary metal. Same stuff that’s packed into the core of this lump of rock we’re standing on, and as long as I’m wearing it there’s a bond between that core and me. And if you or any one of your friends try to pull me away, this iron right here will draw me back. I know it works, because you’re not the first to try it. Understand?”

“Oh, yes. Perfectly,” the fairy agrees.

“So if you were hoping to...steal me away and eat my heart or something, you’re gonna be disappointed.” 

A smile spreads over his lovely, monstrous face that makes the back of Juno’s neck prickle. “You make it sound so tempting.” He leans further in, bracing one arm against the back of the chaise and reaching out with the other to wrap his fingers around Juno’s wrist. Juno resists the urge to flinch away so the both of them can watch as he pulls his arm away, slowly, not breaking his hold but passing through the fairy’s hands like smoke. Dark eyes meet his, impressed with the demonstration. “Alright, Detective, I suppose I can keep my hands to myself.” 

“Okay. Fine.” Juno swallows. “That’s….yeah.” 

“Are we agreed, then?”

Juno closes his eye and takes a breath, and makes a spectacularly bad decision. “Yeah,” he says again, and, “Fair’s fair.” 

“Just so,” the fairy says agreeably, and Juno feels the net close around him, and opens his eye. Nothing in the room has visibly changed, for all his world feels like it’s tilted on its axis. The fairy thief is still leaning in close, the same easy smile ready on his lips. “I don’t suppose you’d give me your name, then?” 

Juno barks out a disbelieving laugh. “I’m not falling for that one.” 

“Yes, I really didn’t think you would,” he sighs, with an unmistakably fond glance. “Clever thief-taker.”

“What about you? What am I supposed to call you?”

The fairy blinks. “Why, whatever your little heart desires, I expect. Obviously I can’t give you _my_ name. Though I could give you a different one….” He taps one finger against his chin, thinking. “Jasper Lin. There, that sounds nice, doesn’t it? I think it suits me.” 

Juno supposes it’s better than nothing at all, and shrugs in indifferent acceptance. “Works for me,” he allows. “Let’s get going...wherever it is we’re going.”


	5. 4. oasis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The search begins

“Helloooo!” Rita chirps, tinny over the comms. “ _This is Rita of Steel and Rita Investigations! Sorry I can’t take your call right now--_ ”

Juno sighs, and leans back against the bricks to hear the message play out. The fairy thief--Lin--insisted there were preparations to be made, hurried off into the night with a promise to return in half an hour and an advisement to Juno himself not to wander off. So Juno’s up to his old standby: wasting time. 

” _\--you’re welcome in advance for saving the day, and for now just go ahead and leave me a message and I’ll get back to you, okay? Bye!_ ”

There’s a beat of silence and a quick chime, and Juno stares blankly at the comms for a moment before he can find the words. “Rita. Hey. This is…you know. I’m...I never meant for you to get...I fucked up. Okay? Didn’t realize how deep this case went. And last time that happened--with Strong and the Dome--I took the fall for it, and I promised you I was gonna be more careful, and then. I wasn’t. And I’m gonna make it up to you, just. Hold on.”

He lets his finger hover over the end call button, and sighs. “And, uh. I guess I should warn you, I’m about to try something pretty stupid, because I figure the only way to get us out of this is to dig myself deeper. So if that goes bad, I’m sorry, and you were right, and I’m an idiot. Otherwise...I guess I’ll see you on the other side.”

The comms beeps at him again before he can hit the button to tell him the message has timed out, and Juno pulls a face at it. “Stupid machine,” he grumbles, and then it beeps again. And again. 

Juno stares as his display lights up and a quick series of notifications flood the screen. He opens one, tentatively, holding the comms at arms length, and finds an image file from one of the older Triad stream soaps. 

For the first time all day, Juno feels the ghost of a smile pull at the corners of his mouth. “Oh, thank god.” 

It’s a stupid code. He’ll go to his grave thinking that much. Stupid, dumb, obscure, cartoonish nonsense that no self-respecting investigator would be caught dead stooping to. But when Rita has an idea...well, the one thing you can usually be sure about is that nobody else has thought to consider the problem from her very unique perspective before. Which makes her codes...pretty hard to crack, actually. 

Would be a more effective method of communication if Juno could keep all the steps to reverse engineering an image search in his head, but after a few frustrating false starts and dead ends he thinks he might be getting somewhere. 

He looks up at the sound of a deliberate footstep to see Lin watching him curiously from a fire escape. “I’m glad you seem to have found a way to entertain yourself, at least,” the fairy says, amused. 

Juno offers him one of the more creative Oldtown Specialty rude hand gestures and returns to scratching out letters and numbers over his notepad, flicking between a picture of a woman on a horse and an actresses’ filmography and criminal record, and scanning the page for the title of the episode. 

“Couldn’t just use Morse,” he murmurs under his breath, checking the numbers again. O...A...S….

“In your own time, then,” Lin says, dropping over the rail and alighting next to Juno in the alleyway. “But I should remind you that you were the one to request _no delays_.” 

“Oasis,” Juno announces, ignoring him. 

“What?” 

“That’s where she is. That’s where we’re going. Somewhere out in the desert, which means she’s still on Mars, probably. Somewhere with a radiation shield.” He tears away the first half of the message, a simple OK BOSS, and shows Lin the rest, scribbled out beneath a network of lines and arrows and crossed out numbers. “See?” 

“I’m not entirely sure what I see, Detective,” Lin says, squinting down his nose at Juno’s penmanship.

“Just….trust me, alright?” 

There’s a quick, dry chuckle from Lin, and Juno turns to him with a glare. “What?”

The fairy turns away, his face visible only in a halo of neon, expression incalculable from this angle. “Nothing. You just...surprise me, I suppose.” He unfolds his long limbs to rise to his feet, and offers Juno a hand that he doesn’t accept. “As it happens, your information is as good as mine. Although, of course, I’m a bit more familiar with the Oasis in question.”

“Oh, good,” Juno says dryly, pushing off the wall. “That’s...good. I’m walking into a trap, right?”

“You’re walking into the Otherworld, dear, absolutely everything is a trap.” Lin tosses the black disc back to him, and Juno fumbles to catch it. In this light he can make out the patterns on its surface with new clarity, and all at once he recognizes it for what it is: a poker chip, carved from volcanic glass. “Now. Are you a gambler, Detective?” 

*

The Oasis Casino Resort stands out in sharp definition against the featureless backdrop of the northern desert, glowing with bright saturated hues like the kind a poisonous animal would paint itself with to warn passers-by of the danger. The facade is elegant and sleek and new, the type of building that looks more like a luxury cruiseliner than a hotel. But Juno knows better than to trust a skyline. 

It’s strange, though. Being reminded just how much of the sky is hidden from Hyperion. Between the neon and the smog and the glare of the dome, it doesn’t matter how good the view is. Your vision has boundaries. The whole universe, as far as you’re concerned, begins and ends with that arc of glowing plasma on the horizon. 

Feeling small isn’t new to Juno. You get plenty enough of that churning around in Hyperion’s guts all your life. It’s just a different kind of smallness out here, under the cold white light of all those stars. Makes him feel too exposed. Seen. By what, exactly, he’s not sure. 

He catches Lin with his eyes on those stars instead of watching Juno, just for a moment, leaning out the passenger window with the sim-wind rustling his dark hair. That eerie gold cast to his irises fades away, until they’re the same rich black as the sky, mirroring the tiny points of light from above. 

There’s a longing in his face that turns Juno’s stomach. He turns his eye back to the road. 

“Alright,” he offers, gruffly. “What’s the plan?”

“Plan?” Lin kicks a foot up towards the dashboard. “This is your rescue mission, isn’t it, Detective? I’m only a guide, not a strategist, you know.” 

“Goddamnit, Lin--”

“Only joking,” the fairy soothes, reaching into the backseat and returning with a garment bag, which he proffers to Juno. “First you’ll want to slip into something more comfortable. The Oasis is a very proud establishment, there is a dress code, I’m afraid.” 

Juno eyes the black bag with reasonable suspicion. “Do you actually have a plan or do you just have an elaborate excuse to make me wear something stupid and uncomfortable under false pretenses?”

Behind his glasses, Lin’s eyes sparkle. “When someone gives you a gift, Detective, it’s good manners not to cast aspersions on their taste before you accept it.”

Juno turns his reasonable suspicion on Lin instead, and the fairy offers him an elusive smile. “It will be easier to get around,” he explains, with a softer voice, “If we blend in.” 

It rankles Juno to think too hard about Others and gifts and reciprocating them, especially with the tiny voice in the back of his head that thinks throwing caution to the wind sounds pretty good, actually, and that he’d probably enjoy fairy fruit on his tongue and fairy music in his ears and fairy hands around his throat, right up until it killed him. It would be a great way to spite a woman fifteen years dead, if nothing else. 

And hell, he’s already here to gamble. 

“I’ll wear the damn suit,” he agrees, gritting his teeth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this IS a short one but the next bit is pretty lengthy so i'll put it up early next week! also thank you all for keeping me updated with your thoughts and feelings it's VERY fun to watch


	6. 5. the ante

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why is a raven like a writing desk?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: canon-typical threats and gun violence

The inside of the Oasis is, if possible, even brighter than the outside. Buzzing like a glowing neon hive even at this hour, with night just beginning to tick back over into day. The ambiance is familiar to Juno in two different ways at once. The patrons, dressed up in silk and lace and platinum, dripping diamonds and disdain--Juno’s seen faces like theirs a thousand times before. In Hyperion City, most of them are starlets of one stripe or another. Media moguls, fashion models, the faces that helped to sell everything from pills to politics to reality TV. Human, but only by a generous, loose application of the term.

Behind those, half hidden in the shadows of the room, there’s another group of faces, watching the patrons with eyes like hawks. By the looks of some of them, the talons and the acid breath of the hawks came included in the package deal. The Others stand at the tables, shuffling cards and stacking chips with eerie, empty smiles on their faces, They lurk around the corners or in the balconies above, hands at their sides, idle but alert. 

“This is a front,” Juno hisses, struggling to match Lin’s long strides and effortless dodging and weaving through the crowd. 

“Naturally,” Lin agrees, and louder, “Do try to keep up, darling.”

Juno huffs. “Would you cut that out?”

Lin glances back over his shoulder. The jewelry in his ear sparkles as it catches the light. “Hmm?”

“The corny nicknames, or whatever.” 

They pass a row of slot machines and turn a corner into another chamber full of crowded tables, utterly identical to the first. “You’ve given me nothing else to call you by, you know.” 

Juno grimaces, trying to pinpoint which direction he’d come from and coming up worryingly short. “Why don’t you make something up, if it’s so damn important to you,” he snaps. 

Another corner turned, and they’re out of the hall and at the base of a wide flight of marble stairs. “I thought you’d never ask,” Lin says happily. “Let’s not dawdle, then, _Dahlia_ , we have a private salon reserved and you never know how quickly the time is going to fly by in this place.” 

He glides up the stairs, and Juno follows, begrudgingly, murmuring, “That’s a stupid name,” under his breath. 

From the second floor they get a view of the twisting, towering columns and neon chandeliers illuminating the halls below, and a few uncomfortably lingering glances from the fairy guards leaning against the balcony. Juno stares back at them like a rabbit in headlights until Lin ushers him on, down twisting passageways and past endless numbered rooms to a woman standing in front of a door, chewing on one end of a long cigarette holder. A cloud of purple smoke hovers around her head, and her eyes burn like molten copper. “Oh, great,” she says flatly, looking Lin over and ignoring Juno entirely. “It’s you.”

“You can tell Mr. Engstrom that his next appointment has arrived now,” Lin answers amiably, with a firm edge to his melodic voice. 

The woman with the cigarette raises an eyebrow. “He’s busy.” 

“He’ll see me.”

She laughs and blows a stream of smoke at him, leaning back against the door. ”Fuck off.” 

There’s a muffled call from within the room, a name Juno can’t make out, and the woman narrows her eyes at Lin before sliding the door open a fraction and disappearing inside. What follows is a long moment of silence, and then a distant sound like someone kicking a piece of heavy furniture. Juno watches the corner of Lin’s toothy mouth twitch up into a private smile. 

“How’d you say you know this guy again?” Juno breathes, staring at the door straight ahead. 

“Oh, he used to occupy quite an influential position in the Court. A legend in some small circles.” Lin fiddles with a cufflink and subtly adjusts the lines of his sharp white suit. “Of course, that was before I came along to replace him. These days, I hear he dabbles mainly in rambling about the glory days with the occasional lesser kidnap.” 

Juno turns on his heel. “Rita. You think this Engstrom has--”

“We’ll see, Detective.” 

After another long silence, the door unbolts and opens into an opulent room with a single table in the center. One wall is a row of mirrors reflecting the windows on the opposite side. Every available surface is plastered with counterfeit artwork, paintings and sculptures and ancient photographs in gilt tin frames.

Seated at the table is an old man with a face so sunken that Juno has to look twice to be certain his skull still has skin on it. His deep-set eyes are almost colorless behind a pair of small round glasses, and there are a dozen heavy rings on his skeletal fingers. The smoking woman stands just over his shoulder, biting hard on the end of her cigarette and glaring at Juno and Lin as they walk in. 

“Well. It has been a while,” Engstrom croaks, his pale eyes on Lin. “Can’t say I missed you while you were away, Burglar.” There’s a turn to his lip that indicates to Juno this is not a flattering title, and a twitch to Lin’s jaw that confirms his suspicions. “What brings you? Official business?”

“My business,” Lin says, striding forward and throwing himself into one of the chairs opposite the old man. “And that’s all you need to know.”

The lilac-colored smoke is thick in the air, rolling around the room like a fog, and Juno stifles a cough into one hand. For just a second, he has an audience of three disapproving faces, and then all three look away again. He shoves his hands deep into his pockets and shuffles a few steps to one side to avoid the worst of it. 

“Oh, but there’s so much more I want to know,” Engstrom continues. “Like what leads you away from the Court this close to Nos Galan Gaeaf. Unless you’re thinking of trying to disappear before the big event?” 

It’s an accusation of some kind, Juno can tell, but Lin makes no sign of rising to the bait. He offers Engstrom a firm little smile and a dismissive wave. “I don’t believe the Court’s dealings are any longer your concern. You’re a freelancer now, aren’t you?”

“Retired, actually,” the old man grunts. 

“I see.” Lin holds a hand out to Juno, who looks blankly between Lin’s fingers and his face for a moment before connecting the dots and removing his own hands from his pockets to drop the poker chip into his upturned palm. He places the little black disk onto the table with a flourish. “So this isn’t one of yours, then?” 

A short wave of electricity floods the room and recedes, and the same rasping voice replays the message Juno has heard once before, the sound a little more distorted now. “ _Hello, Detective_.”

Juno feels his stomach turn and looks away from the poker chip, determined not to listen to the words though the sound of the woman’s voice still paralyzes him with cold dread. Sick and uneasy, Juno watches Engstrom as close as he can. Luckily the man couldn’t keep a poker face to save his life. His already shaky hands twitch restlessly, and his eyes dart away too quickly, caught out. 

“Yes, I thought that might be the case,” Lin says in a low voice as the message fizzles and dies out. “Well, I can’t say I’m not disappointed to see Her Grace settle for second best, but there’s still time to remedy that.”

Engstrom straightens in his chair, still scowling. “What are you getting at?”

“It’s very simple. I want a game, Engstrom.” Lin pushes his chair back and swings one leg up to cross over his other knee, inclining his head to the old man. “If I win, I win this girl you took for leverage, and the Queen has the chance to see her spoils delivered by her own appointed Thief to the Crown rather than a…retired consultant.” His nose wrinkles at the word like it puts a sour taste in his mouth. “And if you win, I offer you a different prize to deliver to her. Something that she will find much more satisfying.” 

Juno scans the room, trying to find this prize Lin is referring to, and looks back to find three pairs of eyes on him for the second time that night. The woman with the cigarette grins a nasty grin with her scarlet painted lips. Even then, it takes a moment for the realization to sink in, and a moment longer before he can find his voice to protest. “You’re wagering _me_?” 

There’s a dry chuckle from Engstrom. “Oh, I’ve waited a long time for the chance to hear you finally admit I have something you want.” He pushes back in his chair, motioning to the woman behind him with one hand. “I’m going to enjoy taking it from you.” 

“We’ll see. Standard variation rules?”

“I’ll play to three losses. I’m a busy man, you know, I have other appointments to keep today.” 

“Anyone planning to tell me what the hell is going on right now?” Juno interrupts, stalking forward. “Or maybe ask me if I’m alright with being the collateral in your little pissing contest, here? 

Engstrom’s cold eyes flick up to Juno, face impassive. “You should control your watchdog better, Burglar.” 

Lin only smiles. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Juno looks at them both, sharp-toothed and otherworldly and half-monstrous, braced against opposite sides of the table like it’s the only thing keeping either of them from going for the throat. He swallows his rising nausea, and lets the rush of indignant rage propel him another hesitant step. 

“Great. Well, my answer’s no, in case anyone was wondering. No, I’m not here to play poker to the death, I’ve kinda got a lot going on, actually, enough people who want me dead already, so if you don’t mind, I’m just gonna g--” 

He spins around, and makes it three steps closer to the door before a shot rings out and a laser brushes by his head so close he can feel the heat on his face. It hits one of the golden statues on the shelf to his left, sends up a plume of violet smoke. Juno freezes, hands half raised on instinct, pulse pounding in his ears. 

“Now, Detective,” the woman with the cigarette says in a voice like ice. “Why don’t you come back here and make yourself comfortable. Have a seat.” 

“No thanks,” Juno grunts. “I’m good.” 

He feels the barrel of the weapon press hard against the nape of his neck. “I insist,” she drawls. 

Juno blinks, lightheaded, and tries to turn and face her before realizing she’s standing in his blind spot. He swallows. “Yeah, you make a really compelling point, now I think about it. Anyone ever tell you you could make a killing in motivational speaking?” 

The bodyguard woman marches him back to the table and sits him down between Engstrom and Lin, neatly maneuvering him by careful administration of the loaded gun in friendly, suggestive jabs. Juno grabs onto the armrests like he’s strapped into a roller coaster, and sits stiffly in the chair, staring at the stacks of chips and dice to avoid glancing in Lin’s direction. 

“Now that inconvenient interruption is settled,” Engstrom growls. “Let’s begin.” 

Juno opens his mouth and closes it again, and then gives up and asks anyway. “What the hell kind of game is this? Do I get to know that, at least?” 

“When you are of a group traditionally unable to deal in falsehood, Dahlia,” Lin says, conversationally, as Engstrom lays out five stacks of black chips in a row, halfway between the two fairies. “Many make do by dealing in obfuscation. We cultivate a passion for the obscure and confounding. Riddles are our bread and butter.”

“Your ask,” Engstrom interrupts. 

“How generous of you.” Juno cranes to look to his right and sees Lin lean forward, fingers steepled against the lovely curve of his mouth. His eyes sparkle behind his glasses. “Well. What can you hold without hands, but never for long; much harder to catch the faster you run?”

He reaches out to flip a tiny hourglass on its head. Barely a grain runs through it before Engstrom coughs out a hoarse laugh. “I assumed you wanted a challenge, Burglar.” 

“I just want you to feel you’re doing well, that’s all.” 

“Play however you want. I’m going to win. If you want to make it easy for me, that’s your prerogative. Breath, by the way--that’s your answer.” 

The hourglass freezes, the sand running back up into the top bulb. “Naturally.”

The pace picks up so rapidly after that that Juno can barely follow, the two of them churning out questions and answers fast as a heartbeat, their rhythm barely faltering. Lin has a sharp tongue and a mind that seems to work at a parsec a minute. Somehow, Engstrom keeps up through sheer stubbornness. He spins his riddles with the confidence of a man who’s been at it for centuries. 

Eventually, though, one of them has to slip up. “This old one runs forever, but never moves at all. He has not lungs nor throat, but still a mighty roaring call.” 

Lin quirks the familiar easy grin, and opens his mouth to answer, and hesitates. The sand runs through the hourglass. Engstrom smiles. 

“My win, I believe,” he chirps, pushing one of the stacks of chips toward Lin, who glares back at him. “You’ve been floating on this desert rock for too long, dear boy. That one’s common knowledge on Ganymede, you know, people travel from the edges of the Outer Rim to see the waterfalls.”

Lin grits his sharp teeth and lifts his chin, pushing on. “What has thirteen hearts but no organs?” he asks primly, and the game begins again. 

Juno sits and watches and tries not to crawl out of his skin. One of his legs starts bouncing under the table and he can’t manage to rein it in again. The barrel of the blaster doesn’t get any more comfortable pressed against his temple with time. 

Lin’s out for blood, he can tell that much. His eyes have shifted back to that flat gold sheen they take on when his inhuman side shows through, and his grin is beginning to look more and more like a fox’s snarl. His questions get terser, too, until he’s gripping the edge of the table and spitting short fragmented phrases at Engstrom. “Always old. Sometimes new. Never sad, sometimes blue. Never empty, sometimes full. Never pushes. Always pulls.”

The old man narrows his colorless eyes at Lin, and sits back, silent and still as a statue while the sand runs out. Lin pushes the second stack of black chips to Engstrom’s side of the table, and sits back, running his fingers through his hair. 

The knot of tension Juno’s been holding in his chest loosens, just a little. He closes his eye, and opens it again to find Lin looking directly at him like...Juno doesn’t want to waste time unpacking how exactly it is the fairy’s looking at him, but it’s something, okay? 

Barely two more rounds go by before Engstrom fumbles again, looking between Lin and Juno with sweat beading on his wrinkled brow and murder in his eyes. Lin pushes the chips his way again with a little flourish, and Juno risks a smirk.

“What do you break by speaking its name?” Engstrom snaps irritably, and turns the hourglass over again. 

“Silence,” Lin answers without even blinking, and they’re off again.

“Who does a lady have to ask to get a drink around here?”Juno mumbles out of the corner of his mouth to the woman holding him at gunpoint. “I’m parched.”

“Shut up,” she growls back. 

Lin makes a quiet, disgruntled noise, and Juno breaks away from the squabble to see him drumming his fingers against the table in irritation. Engstrom pushes another set of chips his way, marking the tied scores. “As soon as we finish this, Valencia,” the old thief grunts. “Find a way to keep that one quiet.” 

“Looking forward to it,” she says.

Juno tries not to consider whether he’s more likely to end up a corpse or trapped eternally in some twisted rock formation in the prison of his own mind. Others are creative. He flashes the pair of them a shaky grin. “Yeah, I get that a lot.” 

“If you’re quite finished with threatening my colleague,” Lin says coolly, and reaches for the hourglass, intoning, “The more you take, the more you leave behind.” 

Engstrom takes a moment to consider this. “Ah. Footsteps.” 

Juno sees Lin’s jaw twitch as the sand flows back up the hourglass again, and he concedes the win with a nod. 

“Alright. Enough.” Engstrom leans over the table, resting his skeletal hands on the surface. “The one who builds it doesn’t want it, the one who buys it doesn’t need it, and the one who needs it doesn’t know it.” 

Juno turns the words over in his head a moment before glancing towards Lin and catching the flicker of hesitation on his face, hastily smothered. He doesn’t know the answer. Damnit, he doesn’t have a clue. 

He looks back to the sand, shifting gradually from one bulb to the other, and weighs his odds. “Do I get a guess here, since it’s my neck on the line, or--”

“Collaboration of any kind is strictly against the standard variation rules, Detective.”

Juno narrows his eye. “Yeah?”

“I’m afraid Mr. Engstrom is right,” Lin agrees. “One asker and one answerer.”

A laugh bubbles up from his throat at that. “So it would be cheating to, say, have your bodyguard tapping out answers in Morse code against the side of my head with her water pistol here, right? Or am I way off base with that, I don’t know the house rules.” 

The old fairy blanches, and Valencia growls, grabbing Juno by the hair and forcing his chin up so she can shove the blaster into the hollow of his throat menacingly. “You little--”

“Go ahead,” Juno manages, through clenched teeth. “Tell me I’m wrong. We both know you can’t lie to me, so just say it.” He flinches away as the iron necklace pulls him out of Valencia’s grip. “I’m listening.” 

Engstrom stares Juno down with his glassy, cavernous eyes, and pushes his chair back from the table with a furious screech against the tiled floor. “This is ridiculous.” 

“Not as I see it,” Lin chimes in. “Because if, as the lady says, you were in fact cheating, you would forfeit one round, meaning…” He pushes the last stack of chips to Engstrom’s side. “I believe you owe us a secretary.” 

“I don’t have to take this,” Engstrom splutters, and Lin rises to his feet, slender fingers twisting and pulling until a blade appears in his hand, so sharp it sings when it moves through the air. 

“You lose,” he says, quietly. “Pay up.” 

“I don’t--” Engstrom shudders and clutches the back of the chair. “--I don’t have her.” 

Juno jostles the table hard enough to upset all the chips and knock the hourglass on its side. “What? _”_

“I...we had her here, in one of the suites, under guard, but she’s slipperier than she looks. I’ve had people on every floor searching since last night, but it’s been nothing but nothing. Scrambled the cameras to hell and back again on her way out, as far as I know they’re still spitting out nothing but static and reruns of It Came From Canis Major.” 

A fond smile springs unbidden to his face. “Sounds like Rita,” he murmurs, proud.

“I’ll call the hunt off,” he concedes. “Your problem now. You want the honor, Burglar, as far as the Queen’s concerned you were the one who lost her, not me.”

Lin sighs and the knife in his hand vanishes. “Typical. I have to do everything around here myself.” He smooths down the lapels of his jacket, and cranes an eyebrow. “You can let my Detective go now, Ms. Valencia.”

Juno stumbles away on slightly shaky legs, returning to the devil he knows, who offers him a tight-lipped smile. “Thank you for your cooperation,” Lin drawls to Engstrom and his attendant, as the door slides shut behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have been STOKED to show you guys this chapter for a minute...i love....dealings with fairies


	7. 6. rusalka

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A step forward, a step back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: abuse - see end notes

“There’s one bed,” Juno says dumbly. He’d walked into the suite prepared with a shortlist of any number of furious accusations or indignant questions to turn on Lin, but somehow this is the observation that makes it to his exhaustion-addled brain first. 

“I said I would stay by your side while we were here,” the fairy offers by way of explanation, stripping off his coat and tie with elegant efficiency that catches Juno’s attention and won’t let go. He moves like a dancer, Juno thinks, when he’s not moving like a predator. 

He shakes his head to clear it, shrugs his own jacket off and drops it over a chair. “That’s comforting,” he grunts. “Considering working with you just came _this_ close to getting me killed.” 

Lin looks up from the blueprints and plans he’s laying out over the coffee table and glances at him with some surprise. “Oh, are we having this conversation already?”

Juno scoffs. “What, you want me to forget about it until the next time you _bet my life?_ ”

“I had it under control.” He purses his lips. “Really, thief-taker, you could try trusting me. It might get you far. I’m only here to help you, after all.” 

“Why _are_ you helping me?” Juno snaps, and he goes still. 

He looks deceptively human, like this, in the flickering half-light of the single bedside lamp, sleeves rolled up and shirt half unbuttoned, hair artfully mussed. Beautifully mundane in a way that strikes Juno as entirely staged. He looks like a painting, carefully crafted to imitate something real, but always a step removed from the truth. “What do you mean?” he asks, gently. “Detective, you came to me, remember? You sought me out.”

“I know that! I know.”

“Well, then--” He demures, still half turned away. “What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time.” 

“Don’t give me that bullshit. What do you want out of it? Really want, because everyone wants something, and you and I both know what you are, _Lin_. You’re meant to make me pay through the nose for every second you’re on this contract, and you know damn well that I’m desperate and out of options, and it’s been two goddamn days and I have yet to hear you say one word about what you’re expecting me to do in return for all...this.” He gestures to the suite, to the blasters and the floorplans and the designer suit jacket laid out over the table. “So what’s the catch, huh?” 

“Has anyone ever told you you have a very cynical way of looking at things?”

“Yeah, well.” Juno sighs. “Call me crazy, but I’m starting to get pretty fucking sick of waiting for the other shoe to drop, okay?” He sits on the edge of the bed, feeling weighed down like the planet itself is trying to pull him under the dirt until he chokes on it. “Whatever. Keep your secrets.” 

Lin is quiet. He continues to fiddle with the rings on his fingers a moment longer, back to Juno, as impenetrable as the muddy haze of a sandstorm. Then he turns and walks to the other end of the table to begin fiddling with the plans, switching the view from floor to floor and highlighting portions at random without looking either at it or Juno himself. After a while, he says. “I think it’s...admirable.”

Juno glances over at him, and sees his face carefully blank, and utterly Other. His sclera have gone black as night, but his pupils shine like flat gold coins. His lips are pressed in a thin line. Juno opens his mouth to speak, but thinks better of it. 

“It’s not often her word is challenged,” he continues, at length, and Juno notes how distantly he speaks. “My employer, I mean. We take what we need, and nobody really minds. People like your…some people just fade away, and between your court and mine nobody pays it any mind. Nobody goes after them.” He looks away again, starts to examine a new corner of the garage plans. “But you...it’s refreshing. You see the big, mean world for what it is, and you defy it anyway. Inefficacious, but admirable.” 

Juno allows himself to be distracted for a moment by the faint memory of a kiss like a thunderclap, then forces away the flush rising in his face by looking carefully at Lin and considering the empty spaces between his words. 

Nobody goes after the ones who get taken. A bitterness that speaks to personal experience. Juno kicks one foot against the bedframe and leans back, staring at the ceiling. “So. How long have.... When did you first...uh. Disappear?”

Lin is quiet again, but there’s a telltale affect to his voice when he replies, airily. “Some might say it’s rude to ask a man his age.”

Juno lets himself fall fully back onto the bed. “Yeah. Sorry I asked.” 

The lamplight continues to flicker. “Twenty years.” Lin says, so soft that Juno almost doesn’t hear it. “Give or take.” 

If Juno tries, he can almost picture a boy with the same bright eyes and proud, sharp nose in a softer, fuller face, staring out at the stars from the sucking empty void between them with a quiet, desperate hunger. Waiting. Instead, he closes his eye and reaches up with one hand to tug aside his collar and wrap his fingers around the cool metal of his iron chain. 

_Soon, Rita,_ he promises. 

 

*

 

It only takes a few seconds after Juno shakes off his uneasy sleep to realize he can’t move. He stares up at the ceiling in the dark, feels his chest constrict with fear, tries desperately to move or speak or breathe. 

A hand reaches out and clutches at him from his blind side, and without looking Juno knows whose hand it is. Knows it with the same certainty that tells his heart to beat. He closes his eye tight and strains until his fingers finally obey, flex and shift and he can grab Benten’s hand right back. 

There’s movement on his left, and a light flicks on. A familiar, tired sigh. “You little monsters aren’t gonna leave me alone until I give you what you want, huh?”

Juno’s got just about enough sense left in him not to turn his head and face her. Not now. There’s a soft footfall and a creak and a dip in the mattress as she perches on the edge of the bed. “One story, alright? Then you’re going to sleep, both of you. I don’t want to hear another peep out of either one of you until the sun’s up. Got it?” 

He’s not sure which Sarah Steel he’s going to see when he opens his eye. He’s never sure, even back then there was no way to be sure. He risks a glance. 

“Once upon a time, uh….” She looks exhausted, of course. She usually did. Hair all wrapped up in her silk scarf, worn-out bathrobe thrown over her shoulders like an afterthought. Frowning. Thinking carefully. “There was a brave knight,” she begins, putting on her storyteller voice, disappearing into the words and letting them take the forefront. “Smart girl, adventurous. Liked nothing better than taking a risk now and then. And she would take any risk for a pretty face.” 

Benzaiten squeezes his hand, and Juno nearly looks over at him, too, before he thinks better of it. 

“And the knight heard reports of a savage beast stalking the mercury lakes outside the city, luring travellers in and drowning them, so she went there herself to put a stop to it. And she tried to ask the locals, but there was nobody living there, nobody for miles around to tell her what the monster looked like. 

“And she camped by the lake for three nights, just waiting, and on the third morning there was a woman, and she came right up to the knight and begged for help. Told her that her friend had been taken by the beast in the night, told the knight that she would pay any price in exchange for her help. And the knight looked at her, and saw only her pretty face, and agreed to help. 

“And the woman led the knight to the very edge of the lake, and pointed out at the far horizon, and said she could see her friend out there, treading water. But the knight couldn’t see anything, so she took another step in, up to her knees. And the girl waded in beside her, kept pointing and assuring the knight that if she went just a little further, she would see. And the knight took another step, waded in up to her chest. And the woman begged her to swim out that distant horizon and save her friend before it was too late, and the knight turned and looked at her and her pretty face, and she stepped in all the way to her chin.” She leans closer as she speaks, painting the scene in words and gestures, until she’s almost hovering over Juno. “And do you know what happened then, my darlings? Can you guess?” 

From some far corner of the room, Juno hears water trickling in, slow and then faster and faster by degrees, until the room is filling and the waves are lapping at the bedcovers. He stays motionless, pinned in place, fixated on dear old Ma and her voice like the slow slide of a knife over his skin. 

“You know how this story ends,” she says. “You know there’s a monster lurking behind that pretty, pretty face, and when the knight steps in too deep it steps up behind her, and wraps its pretty fingers around her neck.” Juno feels them close around him as the water covers his hands and feet, drops Ben’s hand to reach up for the iron chain around his neck, pulled taut. “And it chokes the air out of her, and drags her under the shimmering silver surface, and then there’s one less brave little knight out there to get in the monster’s way.” 

The water fills his ears, and her voice grows distant, distorted. His vision tunnels as he gasps for air, but the chain only pulls tighter. “That’s the trouble with you, Juno,” she sighs, and the water fills his open mouth. “You never listen to your mother.” 

 

*

 

This time, when he wakes, there’s nothing to stop him jolting upright with a gasp, shaking the whole bed in its frame. Juno clutches at his throat and rips away the sheets, staggering to his feet and out and away, as far as he can go. 

“Damn it,” he says, more a ragged whistle than real speech, fumbling around the unfamiliar furniture for his coat. “Fucking...damn it.” 

“Detective?” 

Lin’s propped himself up on one arm, half alert, his dark hair mussed where it rested against the pillows. His undershirt rides up to reveal the smooth brown skin of his hip, the elegant curve of his shoulder. Possessed of that effortless, automatic grace and beauty that makes Juno want to reconsider his policy of never staying for breakfast when he spends the night. Probably doesn’t even apply here, when they spent last night huddled at the antipodes of the king-size mattress, keeping a careful distance. 

“Something wrong?” 

Juno’s eye catches a flash of refracted light and he realizes one of Lin’s hands is wrapped around a switchblade, the easy curve of his spine masking the way his body is tensed for a fight even before his vision has adjusted to the morning light. 

He swallows a wave of nausea. “Just need some air,” Juno wheezes, pushing out into the hallway. 

It’s probably crystal clear, written on his face, that he’s running away. But Lin doesn’t move to stop him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: abuse - Juno has a nightmare about his mother where she insults and threatens him. He also dreams about drowning.


	8. 7. running the maze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Across the wall without a guide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: canon-typical depictions of being chased, graphic depictions of violence and death

He has the number pulled up before he realizes he’s typing it, stands and stares at the screen while the call goes through. “Stupid,” he mutters.

Juno wanders past a few of the sim-wood doorways and flickering sconces while his comms dials a number he knows won’t pick up. He leans against the wall with a sigh, half-hidden behind a projection of a potted Venusian Fern. 

_”Hellooo!!”_ Rita’s voice chimes, and continues, unexpectedly, on a new message. “ _If you’re callin’ to hire Mistah Steel right now, you betta call back later, we’re on vacation and the office is all closed up! And if this is Mistah Steel calling because he still doesn’t remember my comms number is different from the work phone...hiya, Boss. I can’t tell you where I’m at right now, because I got a cover to maintain, you know, I’m In Hiding--_ ” She delivers this in her shrillest stage whisper, and Juno winces at the volume. “ _But! I can tell you that I’m doin’ just fine, no problems here, and in fact me and Frannie have even uncovered a mystery that needs solving. We’re gonna find out exactly where they took that flower you gave me, Boss, and I’m gonna bring it back, and I’m gonna find a nice big aquarium to put it in, right there in the office--_ ”

The message cuts off abruptly with a beep, and Juno stares down blankly at his comms, rubbing the sleep from his eye and groaning. “Rita….” he stops. “Who the hell is Frannie? Nevermind. How did you get out? You didn’t make any deals, did you?” 

He waits like the machine’s gonna give him an answer, suddenly desperately lonely in a way that surprises him with its familiarity. It must be something coded into Juno’s DNA, that he only knows how to keep himself afloat when he’s half of a whole. A twin thing. 

Losing that anchor, that mirror, that steady source of light he can try his best to reflect while he orbits...losing that once was. Bad. Every breath Juno takes, he can still feel the scar tissue clogging up his heart, pulling at his lungs.

“I, uh,” his eye darts away from the screen, dancing over the numbers on the doors without really taking them in. “Know I’m not really in a position to tell you this, with my track record about...Others, and deals, but. Stay safe, okay? I’m not leaving without you.”

He ends the call before he can think better of it, because what else is there to say? He knows what he has to do. He’s come too far to leave it be, as if he ever would. 

Juno unfolds himself from his sanctuary behind the plant and sighs, glancing one way and then the other down the long hallway. “Damnit,” he mumbles, not certain which direction he wants to go, only half certain which direction he’d come from. But at the end of the day, Juno’s faced worse odds than fifty fifty and come out of it alive. He groans and turns right, scanning the room numbers to see if they rise or fall. 

The hall curves, gently but steadily, to one side, and Juno follows it so far that he knows, rationally, he must have come full circle back to where he started. The door numbers are still wrong. Climbing too far in the wrong direction. 

He spins on his heel, cursing, and turns back the way he came, retracing his steps, following the endless sloping curve of the hallway until it spits him out into a goddamn dead end. “What the hell?”

“You look like a lady who could use some assistance.”

Juno glances over his shoulder as a person in a crisp uniform melts out of the wall and offers him a neutral smile. Their hair is elaborately coiffed and their voice is deep and resonant. When they step closer, their eyes catch the lamplight and reflect silvery-bright. Just handsome enough to draw Juno’s attention away from their strong hands and the telltale displacement in the line of their jacket from the weapon on their belt. 

“Just admiring this wall, actually,” Juno says, turning to face the uniformed guard. “Real nice color, thinking of getting it for the office. What’s it called? Eggshell? Ivory? Beige?” 

“I’ll ask around,” the lackey says, still stalking towards Juno. “Anything else I can help you with, Sir?” 

“I--” He feels the weight of the chain around his throat all over again, burning cold against his skin, impossibly heavy. “Think I’m good, actually. Just heading back to my room.” 

He half expects the guard to grab him as he walks by, but they only smile their blank, friendly smile and nod. And, Juno notes, as he turns down the first corner he finds and glances back again, they follow him, at a distance. Unhurried. 

“Shit,” Juno breathes, and turns another corner, and his right shoulder crashes hard into something solid. 

Juno staggers back, and looks up at the widest woman he’s ever seen, in a matching uniform, with gold rings glinting in her ears. An eerie grin splits her face, showing a single silver fang among a row of teeth white as tombstones. “Sorry about that,” the fairy says. “Guess I better watch where I’m going.”

Cold fear races up Juno’s spine, and he opens his mouth to make some excuse but only manages a feeble, croaking, “Anyone ever told you that you’re very big?” 

The woman laughs. “Sometimes,” she says, and draws a plasma knife from her belt, clicking it on with a buzz. 

Juno stares at the glowing blue blade, and thinks briefly about saying something else stupid, and runs. 

 

*

 

There are times Juno almost misses having the ability to charge himself up like a battery, mindlessly execute a command without bothering about a little thing like the limitations of his own body. The Soul was a waking nightmare, of course, but it did make running a lot easier on the lungs. 

Plus, the way Juno lives his life, he’s experienced a lot of waking nightmares. Some of them worse than others. He could argue he’s earned the right to be a little nostalgic about one or two every once in a while. 

Hell, maybe while he’s at it he can start pining for the good old days: getting chased through sewers by killer robots that look like crocodiles, or chased through a museum by killer robots with cameras for heads, or chased through his own office by a killer robot disguised as a client. Killer robots, in Juno’s experience, are politer than Others. They have the courtesy not to laugh with delight while they hunt you down. 

“I hate this,” Juno gasps out, ramming his shoulder into a door as he takes a corner too fast, sucking in a breath that makes something twinge hard behind one of his ribs. “So much.” 

“Settle down,” the deep-voiced fairy says, stalking closer with their knife buzzing white-hot. “You’re disturbing our guests.” Somehow, no matter how far Juno runs, they always seem to come out ahead, cutting him off just when he thinks he might have lost them. 

Juno stumbles away, looking for exits. “I’ve gotten a lot of noise complaints in hotels like this, yeah,” he wheezes. “You get used to it.” 

The other one catches up, rounding the corner and staring Juno down without saying a word. She just licks her lips. 

“So you aren’t going to come quietly, then, Detective?” 

He looks between them, dizzy from turning his head, and grins. “Wasn’t planning on it, no.” He rams his shoulder into the door again, gasping at the impact as it slides open and he falls through. 

The room Juno staggers into is wide, and empty, with a row of argon chandeliers dangling from the vaulted ceiling and a floor paved with tiles of dark stone varnished into a mirror. Filtered daylight dulls the effect a bit, but Juno still finds himself checking to be sure his feet touch the ground as he runs across the polished surface. 

Ballroom, Juno would guess, if he were put on the spot, but right at this second the ability to map his surroundings is not really the most pressing concern that comes to mind. 

He grits his teeth and runs full-tilt for the double doors on the opposite side of the chamber, thinking that if he can just get to--

The doors swing open, and the big security guard grins her silver-studded grin again from the other side. Juno pulls up short, tries to turn back, and has to duck to avoid a searing facefull of plasma knife. He shudders, crouched on the tile, and bites back a terrified scream. His temple pounds, sharp and hot behind his missing eye. A convenient reminder that he’s not fast enough to dodge that kind of swipe every time. Reflexively, he kicks out at the guard standing over him, and experiences the wholly unpleasant sensation of a body falling right through him. 

Juno grimaces, and rolls away, avoiding another swipe of the knife and bracing himself up onto hands and knees. He stares down the big woman, sets his jaw, and runs directly towards her. There’s a numbing cold sensation as he passes through her, but he slips by easily enough. 

“Shit,” he gasps, and reaches for the door. Almost makes it too, but then the one of the floor has the bright idea to use him for target practice. The blade takes a hissing chunk out of his leg as it passes by, and Juno falls with a pained shout. 

“Stay down,” the woman tells him, while Juno clutches at his bloody, smoking thigh and tries to remember how to breathe. 

She’s stepping closer. Reflection of her glowing knife in the dark tiles of the floor. Juno scrabbles, shifting until his back hits the wall. 

“Hold on, just a second, come on,” he gasps out. “Can’t a lady know who wants him dead, at least?” 

The fairy raises an eyebrow. “Right now?” she says. “Me.”

Juno sets his jaw, ready to kick and bite and claw for as long as he can, fingers slipping over the stone until they find the plasma knife lying a few feet away, still sizzling with his blood. He holds his breath and makes a grab for it just as something else darts out of the shadows. 

It moves quickly and without sound, a dark, shifting presence that’s there one moment and gone the next, all claws and teeth and ripping sounds, and the woman standing over him with a knife is motionless on the ground.

The other guard lets out a furious scream, and reaches for a blaster, but the shadow shifts again and in an instant they’re on the floor, wrestling something Juno can barely see the shape of, trading blows and snarling like the police dogs would back on the force, fenced in and programmed to tear each other to scrap metal.

Juno grips the handle of the knife so hard his knuckles go white, and shifts sideways toward the door, muffling his shaky breaths with a hand. 

He doesn’t see who wins immediately, only hears another scream from the guard turn to a rattling hiss. “Fuck,” he whispers, and raises the knife, and looks back in time to watch the shadows coalesce into a familiar figure. 

Lin blinks, and his eyes shift from flat gold to rich black and back again. “I thought I told you not to wander off, Detective.”


	9. 8. port in a sandstorm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An interlude, an escape, and a bit of burglary

“Is this a coat closet?”

“In your own time,” Lin urges, with a tilt of his head. 

Juno ducks under his outstretched arm and comes face to face with the opposite wall. Behind him, the door slides shut again, and he turns, indignant, to find himself nose to nose with the fairy thief. 

“What the hell?” 

Lin makes a shushing noise, and flicks off the overhead light. “Quietly now,” he murmurs, “Somebody made quite a stir out there, we’ll have to wait for the dust to settle again before we make our grand escape.” 

Juno glowers. “And you couldn’t find a spot with a little more air than this one?”

“Any port in a sandstorm,” he croons, with a smile in his voice. This close, Juno can feel the heat of him, a solid, breathing body close enough to touch. Impossible to touch. Leaning into Juno’s space. In the low light Juno can’t see, but he’d bet anything the expression on his face is unbearably smug. 

“You get a real kick out of tormenting me, don’t you?” 

“My, you are a delicate little thing,” Lin says blithely. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean.” 

Juno grunts, and shifts as much weight off his injured leg as he can. If he shifts closer to Lin while he does it, well. It’s not like he has a choice. 

“We’re going to be here for a while, Detective. Let's you and I get to know each other, hmm?” 

“Let's not.” Juno cranes to get a better angle on the ray of light shining under the door, watching for the subtle shifts of shadow to indicate passing footsteps. He keeps his eye on the light and not on the man beside him, and clears his throat. “Actually, I had something on my mind. That rose, from Carter’s garden.” Lin tuts softly. “What did you want it for?”

When Juno glances up, he sees the fairy rifling idly through the coats hanging behind him, slipping cards and tokens from pockets and purses. “You didn’t find the answer in all those notes of yours?” he hums. “I'm not sure I want to tell you now, darling, it would spoil the surprise.” 

“Are you seriously picking pockets while I’m trying to talk to you?”

“I’m not going to waste your time with you answers you already know, Dahlia.”

“You’re not giving me _any_ answers,” Juno accuses, and shifts again to stop his leg from cramping up. “Rita's going after it,” he continues, somberly. “And I’m going with her.”

Lin pauses in his search for an instant, frozen in thought. “I see.”

“You know where the rose is,” Juno guesses. “You know how to get to it.” 

Lin unfreezes, slipping his knife through the sleeve of one of the jackets and retrieving an ace of clubs and a diamond ring from inside the lining. “Contrary to what you might believe, Detective, I don’t know everything. Only most things.” 

Juno grabs him by the wrist, feels him tense and turn in the half-second before his fingers slip through the fairy like smoke. “Listen, you idiot, this is important-- ”

He sighs a beleaguered sigh. “Honestly, dear, I've given you a first name, when will you use it?”

“You haven’t given me jack shit!” Juno shifts the coats aside with a rattle, and grits his teeth, and settles into a tense silence as he abruptly remembers the need for discretion. 

After a long moment, Lin clears his throat, and slips the diamond ring onto one thumb and the creds into his own pocket. When he speaks, his voice is clipped and hushed, like a distant harp played staccato. “I've given you a sound that means a word,” he says, staring sideways at Juno through his glasses. “A signifier to your senses. What else could that be but a name?”

Juno looks him over, long and hard, and tests out another piece of the puzzle to see if any of the edges catch. “What about Nos Galan Gaeaf?” he grunts. “What's that _signify_?”

The corners of Lin’s mouth turn up in a smile, the first in a while to feel empty of genuine amusement. “Oh, Detective! You dont waste time, do you?” 

“What's your court planning?” 

“That’s a very direct question,” Lin says, quietly. “I’ll trade you for an answer.” 

Juno narrows his eye. “What.” 

“Tell me a secret,” he clarifies. “And I will tell you mine.” 

“I’m a private eye,” Juno grunts. “The only secrets I know usually get people killed.” 

“Well.” Lin smiles a crooked smile. “Then it should be a fair trade.” 

Juno stares up at him, feeling the lack of air in the confined space like the walls are closing in tighter with every second. He’s always been too curious for his own good. He nods, quickly, and Lin clears his throat.

“There are forces in this universe,” he begins, oddly stilted, “Much greater than you or me. The court--I--we. Have a duty to uphold them. We are bound by rules and traditions, but not because we made them for ourselves. We are merely their caretakers.” Lin looks sidelong at Juno, a strangely blank expression on his soft face. “Stewards of the galaxy. It’s rather fascinating, really.” 

“So it’s some kind of ritual?”

“It’s a festival,” Lin corrects him. “The most important festival we have, and we have many. Legend has it that Nos Galan Gaeaf is the spark that keeps the stars burning and the planets on their course. It only comes around every seven years or so, but when we mark it--”

“That’s what’s coming?” Juno interrupts, blood running cold. “Some fairy festival to prevent the heat death of the universe?” 

“If you believe the stories,” Lin says. “Really, it’s more likely a lingering clause from some peace treaty brokered with another court eons ago, and there’s no telling whether anyone at all cares if we uphold our end of the bargain anymore. But people are just so caught up in the _ceremony_ of the thing, you see, we couldn’t bear to let it go.” 

Juno sighs. “And you? Where do you come in?”

“Oh, Detective, I’m the one who makes it all possible.” Lin leans in close. “You see, there’s a tithe to be paid at the end of all this. The bigger, the better. The score of the century offered up as a ransom every seven years. A grand ceremonial sacrifice. And it’s my job to collect it.” 

“The thefts I’ve been following?” Juno interrupts. “Great, yeah, of course you couldn’t just fence the stuff off. Would make my job too easy, right?”

“I let you take the rose, didn’t I? I thought that was more than fair.” 

“Yeah, well, apparently your boss doesn’t agree.” 

Lin purses his lips. “She can be. Difficult when she doesn’t get her way,” he admits, in a low voice. “You know, I thought I might take some time off, after these celebrations are over. Get away for a little while.” 

The line of his back has gone rigid and tense, and his face is turned half into shadow, still curiously blank. Juno shifts again on his bad leg, and looks away. “Rita could help, probably,” he says. “If you need to disappear. She’s not subtle, but she’s smart. Got a friend of mine out of a bad contract a little while ago.” He coughs. “Got me out of a bad spot, too.” 

Lin raises a brow, and shakes the tension from his shoulders. “We’ll see,” he dismisses politely. 

Juno can stand the quiet about half a minute before he caves. “What the hell, it’s a story,” he murmurs, and folds his arms around himself tightly. “I was a sharpshooter, before…” he gestures vaguely to the right side of his face. “And when I lost the eye, I couldn’t do it anymore. I hit a wall, didn’t know how to cope. So I worked out a deal with...doesn’t matter who, but he was fey. I did odd jobs for him, he gave me a neat magical solution to my problem, it was a match made in heaven.” 

He glances up and meets Lin’s eyes, dark as polished obsidian, looking into Juno like he can see right through him. “And I knew better than to trust a bargain like that, of course I did, but I liked him. He had this way with words. Had me convinced we made a good team while he was pulling my strings and I was dancing along like a good little puppet. Killing people on his orders. And the thing is...I don’t know if he was wrong about that.”

Lin’s eyes are still on him. Juno clears his dry throat, shuffles his weight again and keeps his face tilted down. “Took a year, but I got out, Rita saved me, he...he died. Whatever, end of story. Point is, if you’re ever in the market for a new job...people get out.”

This time, the silence stretches even longer. Lin is quiet and still beside him, spinning one of his rings around his finger before offering up a tentative smile, and resting a hand on Juno’s shoulder that passes right through him. “Thank you, Dahlia,” he says. “I’ll consider it.” 

“Yeah?” 

“But in the meantime,” he deflects, straightening up and rifling through one of the coats again. “We really ought to be on our way. The festival’s in two days, you know, we simply can’t miss it.” 

Juno groans. “The garage is a mile away,” he announces. “Please tell me we’re not crawling through the vents?” 

“Oh, not at all,” he reassures, retrieving a small metal ball from one of the pockets. “We won’t be going by car.” He turns it over in his hands, twists until an eerie red light clicks on inside, shining out through a pattern of cracks on the surface of the sphere. 

“The hell is that?”

Lin considers it for a moment with his lips pressed together, and sighs. “Would you prefer I call it a babylon candle, or a short-range teleporter? Don’t look at me like that, darling, I can’t bear it.”

“I’ll walk, thanks.” 

“Two days,” Lin repeats, holding the sphere out in Juno’s direction. “And I’m sure your Rita is there already.”

He considers the candle with his eye narrowed, looking between Lin and the coats. “Is that thing Engstrom’s?” 

Lin offers him a butter-wouldn’t-melt expression, and demurs, “You know, It’s so easy to get turned around in a place like this, you’d have to practically memorize the building plan to find your way to a specific closet in one man’s private study. We could be anywhere.”

“Well...knock yourself out, I guess,” Juno says, resigned. “Bastard already wants me dead, anyway, more petty larceny won’t hurt.”

“Grand larceny,” Lin corrects. “These teleporter models are very rare.” 

Juno glares, and places his hand on the sphere. “When I get motion sick on your shoes,” he announces. “I’m blaming you.” 

“I expect nothing less.” He grins his fox’s grin, and Juno feels a tug behind his ribs as the candle flickers to life and he takes one step forward into empty space. The iron chain burns cold against the back of his neck, pulling, trying to drag him back down to Mars while they fly across the planet’s surface like twin shooting stars. 

Juno is off-balance when they touch down again, staggers sideways into a pillar of volcanic rock, and forgets his nausea entirely as his eye adjusts to the sight. For a second, he thinks they’ve materialized on a rooftop. But after a glance around, it becomes clear that they’re perched a few feet from the edge of a canyon that drops off into a sheer cliff. The rest of the skyline is an ocean of glittering darkness, with towers and bridges and stone spires jutting out of the landscape like teeth. The city like a gaping mouth stretches nearly as far as the eye can see in either direction, except where the opposite edge of the cliff rises in the distance to mark the border. 

A skyline doesn’t show you everything, Juno tells himself, taking a shaky breath as he stares over the edge at the seemingly bottomless drop into the dark. Just a pretty picture for a postcard. A nice facade to cover up the dark underbelly of a city. 

It’s sure is a hell of a skyline, though. 

“Well, Detective,” Lin says, just over his shoulder. “Welcome to Valles Marineris.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nos Galen Gaeaf, if you haven't looked it up by now, would be the welsh name for the festival of Samhain, because DID you know that tam lin is a halloween story? anyway I love worldbuilding
> 
> ALSO! I don't know if I ever clarified the timeline in notes, but to explain it properly: I wanted to play with Juno's season 2 growth and change but also heavily feature the season 1 characters? so essentially, all the events of season 2 have happened, with Ramses as a fae patron, but most of season 1...hasn't happened. at least any part involving Peter or Miasma. It's a strange AU but listen. a timeline is just a suggestion


	10. 9. valles marineris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juno takes a leap of faith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hhh my buffer of finished chapters...is waning....my loose ends...i must look to them
> 
> cw: canon-typical peril

When people spread across the stars, centuries ago, took their first steps away from Earth, Mars was the first planet they looked to. Hyperion was the first colony they ever built. Juno’s heard as much in every history class he didn’t sleep through or skip, just like he knows Hyperion has never been Mars’ oldest city. 

Hyperion is so old that it’s built more onto itself than it is grounded to the surface of the planet, old networks of subways and bunkers built on top of older subways and bunkers and research tunnels. Endless irradiated mazes with no exit.

But this city, Valles Marineris, seat of the Solar Court, was already built a hundred layers deep before Hyperion was a twinkle in humanity’s eye. What’s rotting underneath Hyperion is an anthill, compared to this.

“You ought to stay out of sight,” Lin says, herding him into the mouth of a tunnel like a gaping wound. Juno hesitates. 

“Can’t do that above ground?” he asks. “Not that I have something against creepy caves, or anything, I’m sure it’s prime real estate, very homey. And, uh...dark.” 

The fairy raises a brow at him, and slowly raises his hand, reaching out to Juno with one slender finger that comes to rest just above his collarbone, where the iron chain presses against his skin. There’s no sensation at the touch, but Juno holds back a shiver anyway. “Good-luck charms don’t ward against everything, thief-taker,” Lin breathes. “Trust me. I’ve brought you this far safely, haven’t I?” 

“For a loose definition of the word, sure,” Juno grumbles, and follows his lead.

The dark swallows them up, and Juno’s already limited vision recedes gradually to nothing. He reaches out to brace a hand against the wall and feels volcanic glass, cool and smooth and irregular. The whole tunnel’s carved out of it, like they’re passing through a calcified artery straight to the heart of the planet. 

In the dark, Lin’s eyes turn again to flat gold discs, chatoyant and eerie and the only feature visible through the blackness. He steps with the confidence of a man who sees exactly where he’s going. It’s a side of him Juno’s only seen the hints of, before now. More comfortable in shadow than in light. 

“You know there’s really no need to be nervous,” he says, conversationally, as Juno grits his teeth and tries to keep his feet from slipping over the stones. 

“I’m not nervous.” 

“Of course,” Lin agrees, magnanimously, and, “Ah, this way, Detective.” Juno moves in the direction of his voice, warm and resonant as it echoes down the dark passageway. “But if you were perhaps feeling a bit on the skittish side, I would reassure you that there is no safer place in this city than right here.”

“With you, you mean?” Juno grumbles. 

Lin laughs, and the sound makes Juno’s heart twist uncomfortably in his chest. “You said it, not me.” 

Scowling, Juno stumbles after him, the path beginning to slope sharply downwards. “Where are we going, anyway? There some kind of vault where your people are keeping the score?”

“Stop,” Lin says sharply, and Juno takes a reflexive step back as the wall falls away from his fingertips without warning. “Carefully, dear, we’re going over a bridge. Mind the sides.”

He doesn’t mention how far the drop is, Juno notes, screwing his eye shut and taking a few tentative steps forward. Trying not to wobble “This would be a hell of a lot easier with a flashlight, you know.” 

“Not really,” Lin muses. “Most of the things that are visible here are illusions.” 

Juno pauses for a moment to breathe. “Oh, great. That’s really...great.” 

“You’re doing very well, I think,” he says. “Nearly there.” 

“Yeah, well...you’re going to a lot of trouble to keep me alive,” Juno mumbles. He’s distracted, a little, trying to keep his balance, which is why he doesn’t quite manage to disguise the suspicion in his voice. Lin’s footsteps ahead of him go quiet for a moment. 

“The vault is much closer to the city center,” he announces without preamble, as though they had been discussing this all along. “And deeper underground. There are preparations to be made before we move on it, of course, but we should have until...tomorrow, at least, before my employer realizes what we’re up to.” 

“And now you’re actually plotting to help me rob your own boss,” Juno says, still inching forward. “Going above and beyond. That’s not just protecting your investment, that’s something else.” 

“Really,” Lin says flatly. “You’re going to make my saving your life into an accusation now, are you? If this working relationship is to be at all beneficial--”

“Working relationship, that’s rich,” Juno scoffs. “I’m still trying to figure out exactly whose side you’re even _on_ , here.”

“My _own side_ , Detective.” His voice is sharp and cold as ice splintering, and then fractured and small when he continues, “I want my name back.” Gold eyes flick up to Juno’s face, and away again, “And if I can’t have that, I want to drive a knife between Her Majesty’s ribs and _twist_.” 

Juno flinches, which turns out to be a mistake as he overcorrects and stumbles, and suddenly there’s nothing under his feet at all. He shouts as his stomach dips and he slips over the edge, reaches back and manages to find a handhold as his feet scrabble against featureless black glass and his shoulder is wrenched almost hard enough to make his fingers go numb. 

“Dahlia!” 

Juno claws at the slope until his other hand catches another jagged edge to grip onto, and hangs there, feet dangling helplessly into the featureless dark. “Shit,” he gasps, and shuts his eye as the vertigo makes his head start to spin. There’s no change in the quality of the darkness. 

“Detective, take my hand,” Lin is saying, Juno can almost hear it over the frantic galloping of his heartbeat. He glances up and sees his eyes shining in the pitch black, some uncertain distance above. “Come on,” he urges, voice tight. 

The edges of the glass cut into his fingers when Juno tries to pull himself up, and he feels himself going nowhere fast. He kicks at the wall again, squints up with his single eye and feels every breath shudder through his chest. It makes no sense how he can be sucking in air so fast and still feel so dizzy and breathless. “I can’t see,” he gasps. “I don’t know where--”

“Reach up, and I’ll grab you,” Lin promises. “You’re close, darling, you’re nearly there.” 

Juno stares up at him a minute longer, mind wiped clean of everything but spiraling, all-consuming fear. He flexes his grip and feels it weakening, arms shaking with the exertion. He can’t make out Lin’s expression, only the unnatural glow of his eyes, but it would be hard to miss the desperate edge to his voice. “Please, sweet, just trust me.” 

Juno’s brain finally kicks into gear, his historically unreliable survival instinct putting itself to good use and giving him another burst of adrenaline. He grunts and reaches up, feels Lin’s slender hand wrap around his arm firmly and pull. 

And then, like oil and water, Lin’s hand passes straight through his, and Juno falls back again. Lin makes a soft, wounded noise as all of Juno’s weight falls onto his other arm and he slips out of reach once more. “I--I didn’t….” he stammers. “I swear, I don’t know what--”

Juno groans and rests his head against the glass, holding on with all his might. “Shit,” he manages, “The fucking...iron. You can’t….hold me.” 

The glowing eyes go wide with recognition. “Detective--”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grunts, already reaching up with numb fingers to tug at the chain. He twists it around his fingers again and squeezes his eye shut. “I mean, what the hell, right?” 

He looks up again to meet Lin’s gaze and feels his grip start to give way, braces himself and pulls at the necklace hard, breaking the latch and then letting it fall into the darkness below as he surges up with the last of his strength. There’s a split second of complete free-fall. 

Then Lin catches him, with a shockingly strong grip for such a delicate hand, and before Juno can even catch his breath he’s heaved bodily upwards, lifted back onto solid ground, collapsing in a heap on top of the fairy who just saved his life. 

Ordinarily, Juno’s got a knack for denying himself the things he wants, but now, in this moment, he doesn’t fight it, resting his head on Lin’s narrow chest and waiting for his lungs to stop seizing. After a moment, one slender arm tentatively wraps around him, holding him there. 

For a stupid, reckless second, Juno thinks he feels safer right about now then he ever has in his life to date. It makes him laugh, even though the laugh comes out more like a wheeze. Lin’s other hand reaches up to brush through his hair, careful and disarmingly tender, and he turns Juno’s face towards his. They’re close enough now that Juno can make out all the features of his face, brow creased, lips slightly parted. Close enough that Juno can feel him inhale with the intention of speaking, probably to ask some inane question about whether he’s hurt, which doesn’t matter because Juno feels like he can never be hurt again, and a little like he’s already dying, too, the way his breath catches in his throat and his chest goes tight. Whatever he’s going to ask, Juno doesn’t wait to hear it before he leans down and catches that pretty mouth in a kiss. 

Lin’s hand tightens in Juno’s hair, and he kisses him back eagerly, hungrily, holding him fast. 

* 

“Boss! It’s about time you picked up this comms when I called you, you got me so worried that my tummy was getting all rumbly. Unless my gut’s only gurgling because I miss my salmon crunchies so much, I’m not sure. You didn’t bring any, did you?

“I…..no, I forgot. Tell you what, Rita, next time you get kidnapped, I’ll remember to bring snacks along on the rescue mission.”

“You betta! I promised Frannie I’d let her try one, you know.”

“Uh huh, about that. Who the hell is Frannie?”

“Ooh, Boss, you’re gonna love her. I ran into her when I was sneakin’ around that casino, she told me all about this big sacrifice parade whatchamacallit that the fairies are all running around trying to get ready for, it sounds _just_ like that horror movie where the girl’s face turns into a giant bug, remember? Gave me the creeps so bad I had to marathon a whole season of _Moon Munch_ just to sleep through the night. Only the marathon went kinda long, so I’m not sure I slept anyway.” 

“Yeah, I...heard the same thing? I think? Listen, Rita, I’m gonna send you some coordinates, you find out as much as you can about the building and meet us there in twelve hours, okay? We’re gonna rob the Fairy Queen. Or try, I guess.” 

“It’s a heist! You know, I can’t think of any streams right now where a couple of hotshot detectives rob any evil fairies, or at least not any where they get away with it. But I’m sure it’s gonna go great, Mistah Steel.”

“Hm.” 

“Hey, Boss?”

“Yeah?”

“You keep saying ‘we’ and ‘us’ and you’re not talking about you and me every time. You got someone with you?”

“Yeah. I, uh...kinda made a deal. With an Other.”

“Boss!”

“I know! I know, but.” Juno glances across the room at Lin, who’s checking the locks on all the doors of the safehouse he’d led them to, drawing the blinds on the windows. “I feel like I can trust this one.” He lowers his voice. “He’s saved my life, Rita. More than once.” 

She’s quiet for a moment. “Okay, well...if you’re sure, Mistah Steel.”

“I’m not, not completely. But I don’t know if that matters. He makes me feel...I don’t know. I think we’re gonna get through this.” He breathes. “Yeah. I really do.”


	11. 10. golden dram

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ;)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: explicit sexual content

He can feel Lin watching him. 

He’s sprawled across the couch, shirt unbuttoned low enough to show a tantalizing strip of skin, one leg crossed over the other in a way that makes Juno’s face heat if he looks too long. So he doesn’t. 

“You’ll wear a hole right through the floor if you go on pacing like that, Dahlia.” His voice is soft, musical, teasing at Juno’s ear. “There’s a bottle of something very old and single malt just above the mantel there, you know, you could pour us both a drink, if you like.” 

Juno seeks, and finds. “You live here?” 

“Not in so many words,” Lin stretches. “But I do know the owner. More specifically, I know that they booked an interstellar flight to Medea Twelve a year ago that never landed. I’m taking care of the place in the interim.” 

Juno wrinkles his nose. 

“Glassware in the cabinet to your left, love.” 

These, Juno retrieves with a sigh, and crosses back to the couch to offer one of the glasses to Lin. The whiskey shines honey-gold in the dim light. 

He takes it with a nod and a sharp, sideways grin, fingers brushing over Juno’s hand and lingering. Juno’s eye tracks the way his fingers curve over the glass as he throws his head back and drinks. He follows suit, mouth dry. 

“Lovely,” Lin says so softly that Juno nearly shivers. And then, setting the glass down, reaching out with one upturned palm. “Come here, thief-taker.” 

Juno swallows, and sucks in a breath, and takes his hand.

He allows himself to be pulled in, settling over Lin’s thighs and chasing the whiskey taste from his lips, his tongue. Juno’s hands find Lin’s shoulders, tug at the collar of his shirt. “Shit,” he groans. “I want…” He loses track of the thought as the fairy’s teeth scrape across his bottom lip and tug. The smell of him, the rich notes of that cologne that Juno can never get out of his head, makes him almost dizzy. 

“What is it you want from me, hmm?” Lin’s lips brush over the corner of his mouth, across the plane of his cheek, his jaw. His fingers rest over the side of Juno’s face, holding him as he presses soft kisses to Juno’s skin. “My Dahlia.” 

“Juno,” he chokes out, and feels his heart skip a beat at the admission, pulse racing in his neck, a whisper away from Lin’s sharp teeth. “Juno Steel.” 

“Who?” Lin’s hand stays firm on his cheek, and he pulls away, his eyes darting over Juno’s face as he pieces it together. “You. You’re telling me your name?” 

Juno laughs a little wildly. “Come on, you’ve earned it.” 

“I…” His eyes are wide and his face is very still for a moment, brushing his hand over Juno’s temple and brushing fingers through his hair. He looks almost shaken by the idea, maybe even a little sick, though that might be only Juno’s imagination. “Ah.”

“I don’t expect you to give me...yours,” Juno croaks, feeling frozen and a little awkward. “I just. Wanted to hear you say it. If you want.” 

Lin stares at him a moment longer, wonder mixed with desire, and pulls him down into another kiss, slow and deep enough to make his head go pleasantly fuzzy. “Juno,” Lin whispers. He makes it sound like music. One of Lin’s hands catches at his waist, pulls him closer and holds him firm as his mouth leaves a dark bruise against Juno’s throat. “Juno, Juno--” 

“Yeah,” Juno agrees, and, “Don’t stop.” 

His lean fingers slide under the hem of Juno’s shirt, and Juno trembes at the feel of Lin’s touch on his skin. Lin’s dark eyes on him. “Would you let me have this?” He asks, voice raw. “Will you let me take you apart, Juno Steel?” 

Juno pushes his hips up against Lin’s thigh with a heartfelt groan, eye falling closed and mouth falling open. “Not gonna lie,” he says, “I’d be kinda disappointed if you didn’t.” 

Lin smiles wide and sharp, and pins Juno flat on his back, fast as a whipcrack, strong hands braced on either side of his head. He tilts his head and his irises flash gold. Staring up at him, haloed in the dim light, Juno doesn’t breathe. 

After a long moment of consideration, Lin shifts back onto his knees, takes Juno’s chin in his hand and brushes a thumb over his lower lip, carefully. Tenderly. Everywhere he touches Juno feels like an electric shock in slow motion. “Such a pretty mouth,” he praises.

Juno wraps his lips around the digit, and Lin’s grin shows approval. His other hand he traces along Juno’s side again, brushing low enough that Juno can’t hold back a quiet, ardent gasp. He feels caught, absolutely pinned down by strong hands and keen eyes and the promise of those sharp teeth. It’s a relief, in a way, to stop rowing against the current and lean into it, let gravity pull him right where it feels like he belongs. To give up the fight. 

It’s pretty novel, actually, giving in to something that’s not actively trying to kill him. Might have to try it more often, Juno thinks, while Lin’s fingers press against the inside of his cheek and he slides his slacks down over his hips. 

Once he’s stripped bare, Juno settles back against the cushions, and finally gets his hands on Lin, tugging him closer. But he’s infuriatingly patient, still tracing slow, lingering touches over Juno’s skin, watching him shiver. “Come on,” Juno says, hoarse. “What the hell are you waiting for?” 

“Always in such a rush.” The gentle pressure of Lin’s hands spread his thighs apart, and he brushes so close to the place Juno’s aching to feel him that Juno bites back a groan. “Relax, darling. Let me take care of you.” 

“Wish you would,” Juno says, through gritted teeth, and grunts when Lin laughs like tinkling bells and takes him in hand, firm pressure of his lithe fingers and heat and too much and not enough all at once. 

“Look at that,” he muses, warm breath in Juno’s ear while he moves rhythmically and just rough enough to be worth his time. Thumb pressing and sliding just under the head, forcing a guttural moan past his lips. “Magnificent, Juno.” Every time Juno thinks he’s settled into the pace, Lin shifts it again, leaves him dizzy and breathless in an embarrassingly short amount of time. 

Juno’s hands clutch at the cushions, and he turns his face to the side, hiding a blush that reaches to the roots of his hair. “Oh, god,” he moans. “Oh shit.” 

Lin makes a soft sound of appreciation, and kisses him over the prickly stubble at his jaw. “What do you think, hmm?” His touch turns lighter, and Juno cants his hips up, chasing the feeling. “What do I do with you?” 

“Come here,” he pleads, “Come on, Lin, please, I gotta...wanna feel you.” 

“Alright.” His touch is feather-light against Juno’s cheek and teasing against his cock. His eyes are hungry. “Alright, darling,” Lin agrees, in a ragged voice. 

Juno closes his eye and digs his fingers into the couch, heavy and hard and dripping with want, waiting and trembling until Lin returns, all his skin bared to the moonlight, so ethereally beautiful that he looks like he could disappear at any moment. 

The weight of him, when he settles between Juno’s thighs, is wonderfully solid. A proof against all the odds that he must be real. One of his long legs tucked against Juno’s hip, his cock dragging along Juno’s belly as he presses closer, kissing him deep enough to steal the air from his lungs and sweet enough that Juno doesn’t begrudge him the theft. 

He reaches up, runs his hands over Lin’s back, feels the muscles shift under his fingers. “Hey,” he mumbles, grinning when Lin pulls away, flushed, his mouth bloodred and his eyes so black they could swallow Juno whole. 

There’s a little curl of dark hair spilling over his forehead, out of place, and Juno looks at it in something stupidly like wonder. He can’t tell where the man ends and the monster begins, from this angle especially, and for once the mystery of it is something fascinating, rather than harrowing. 

With a grin, Lin starts to move, and the heady friction pulls Juno from his reverie. He groans, and holds tighter, grinding back against the junction of Lin’s hip. 

He sets the pace, and Juno loses himself in it, the slow rhythm of their bodies moving in tandem, breath in and breath out and wet and heat and pleasure, building until time feels like it’s stretched out around him, like there’s only this forever. And maybe it’s true, hell, he doesn’t know. Fairy magic’s hard to pin down like that. 

Juno gets close, gasps a wordless plea, and lingers just on the edge for what feels like an impossibly endless moment, shaking, clinging to Lin like he’s at the center of a collapsing star. “Oh fuck,” he whines. “M’gonna--”

“Just so,” Lin murmurs, his voice like silk tearing, his lips hot on Juno’s neck. 

He feels the sharp points of teeth scrape against his throat, prickling over his hammering pulse, and time comes unstuck again in a momentous rush. Juno groans and comes so hard he feels like he’s flying.

Without the weight of the iron to draw him back again, it takes a while to find solid ground. Juno catches his breath, falls back against the cushions and watches Lin take himself in hand. 

He’s the kind of beautiful that looks like it can’t be touched. The graceful slope of his shoulders, the tremor of his thighs, the scarlet shine of his mouth shaping Juno’s name. The hand not wrapped around himself caresses the side of Juno’s face, stroking along his cheek. “Juno, Juno, oh darling--” 

“You got it,” Juno says, hoarse and more than a little punch-drunk in the afterglow. “It’s yours.” 

Lin makes a choked noise, and shuts his eyes tight. His come paints over his own hand and spills onto Juno’s chest, like he knows exactly what’s his. Juno presses a sloppy kiss to the inside of his wrist, reaches for him and tugs him down so their lips meet.

It feels right, in a way almost nothing has since he came here. The kind of kiss that feels like it could last the rest of Juno’s life. More than he deserves, maybe, but then Juno’s been on a self-indulgent streak lately. Hasn’t gotten him killed so far. 

*

Night gives way to day and in the shadows of Valles Marineris there’s no way to mark the change. Sleep is elusive. Juno waits in the dark for as long as he can stand to, and then throws the covers off to figure out where the hell his shirt ended up. 

He’ll sleep better when this case is over. When he sees Rita again. Juno knows it with the same dogged intuition that’s been leading him astray for nearly forty years now. 

Because he’s been waiting, hasn’t he, for everything to go back to normal? Since he lost his eye and his only marketable skill to a lucky swipe from a plasma knife. Since he went running off into the desert after a city that didn’t exist. Since losing his soul and taking it back again. Since crossing the wall. He’s still pretending there’s any shred of the person he used to be left to go back to. 

Juno’s always spent too much time looking over his shoulder. Maybe when this case is over, he can take his chances on something new. Jump straight ahead into the unknown. See what the stars look like from up close. And maybe...Lin’s the right guy to take him there. 

He wipes the stupid grin off his face, and shrugs on his coat. “Here goes nothing,” he whispers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its....tam lin......and tam lin is a ballad EXPLICITLY about fucking the fae
> 
> FOR the record bc im just now realizing its ambiguous based on Juno's past record, he's not walking out at the end there, just being an early riser


	12. 11. blood money

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything goes exactly according to plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: canon-typical violence

He hears her before he sees her, a frantic whispered, “Over here, boss!” ringing out of the darkness. Juno stops so suddenly that Lin nearly runs into him from behind. 

Juno reaches out, and Lin hands him the teleporter candle, turned so the faint red glow casts enough light over the volcanic glass to see by. And she’s there, waiting behind one of the carved black columns, smile blinding even in the dim light. 

Juno stares at her for a moment, throat feeling tight, before he manages a creaking, “What took you so long?” 

Rita rolls her eyes, throwing up her hands. “Well sorr-ee, boss, I took a wrong turn somewhere near the spaceport and it took me forever to find a road that didn’t just dump me back where I started.”

“That’s an old trick,” Lin chimes in, knowingly, and bows a little. “You must be this Miss Rita I’ve heard so much about. Your employer here tells me you’re the very best secretary in the business, though truth be told I think he undersold your charm.” 

Flattery’s always been a weak spot of Rita’s. She giggles, wide-eyed, and returns Lin’s bow with a very lopsided curtsy. “We-e-ell. Your gentleman friend really knows how to talk to a gal, doesn’t he?”

God help him, they get along.

Juno takes a breath, and ushers both of them on, a little desperately. “Yeah, we can save the icebreakers for later, alright? This vault isn’t gonna open itself.” 

Lin laughs, and quick as a wink bends over to plant a swift kiss on Juno’s mouth. “I hope you aren’t feeling jealous, dear.” 

Juno’s face goes red-hot, and he ducks his chin below the collar of his coat to avoid looking at either of them. Rita’s squeal of surprise makes his ears ring. “Oh my god,” he murmurs to himself, waiting for another pit to open in the floor under his feet. 

“Come along, Detectives,” Lin says. “Not a minute to lose.” 

Juno opens his mouth to offer him a smart reply, rounds the corner to the mouth of the tunnel, and forgets what he was going to say. Rita gasps. 

The castle juts up out of the void like a shard of bone, bleached white against the black cavern walls of Valles Marineris, glowing with a light that seems to emanate from the stones themselves. The architecture is elegant, in a skeletal sort of way, all towers and arcades and splintering spires. There’s a wide road meandering down from the city to the front gate, and the way is lined with the distant shapes of faceless guards. 

“Home, sweet home,” Lin says dryly, and glances back at the two of them, eyes flickering like matchsticks. “The servant’s entrance is around the side. Stand close by me and I can keep you unseen, both of you. But you’ll have to stay quiet.” 

Juno glances at Rita, uncertain. “What happens if we can’t do that?” 

“Oh, we all die, most likely,” Lin assures him.

“I’m just saying,” Juno points out. “This is a lot to risk for a rose.” 

“A million-cred rose, Boss,” Rita says. “ _Plus_ there’s all your notes about the case, and--”

“Yeah, but the case is a bust,” he says, crossing his arms. “A few rich people got robbed. What am I gonna do about it? Walk up to the Queen of Fairies and tell her ‘Hey, Your Majesty, I know you’re a thousand-year-old unkillable alien nightmare, but you’re under arrest’?”

“If anyone could manage,” Lin says, with a fond half-smile. “It would be you, dear.” He ushers them forward, down a set of slick obsidian stairs curling around the side of the cliff face. “I’m sure if you just...steal all of it back again, your clients would find that more than satisfactory.” 

Juno laughs, despite himself, and holds on to Lin’s arm for balance, leaning in close. “What about you?” 

Lin falters, again, smile flickering at the edges. “What are you getting at?” 

“If we steal back everything she took,” he says, voice low. “Would that settle it? Rita gets her rose, you get your name. Fair’s fair.”

“Detective--”

“Not sure I know how to do it, actually, steal a name, but hey, I’ll try anything once.” 

“Juno,” he interrupts, fragile and soft as a whisper, and Juno hears the denial in it, and stops. Lin quirks his lips sadly. “I’m afraid some things can only be taken when they are freely given.” He clears his throat. “But thank you.” 

Juno looks him over, and tilts his chin up defiantly. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll keep working on it.”

Lin laughs dryly. “Your stubbornness never ceases to amaze, Detective.”

He shrugs. “Everyone’s got a flaw.” 

“Come on!” Rita calls, from up ahead. “I wanna see the castle from the inside!” 

*

There’s a disconcerting lack of resistance to the infiltration, a simple matter of slipping through the back door and meandering the empty halls like they’ve wandered away from a tour group. 

“Where is...everyone?” Juno whispers through his teeth.

Lin furrows his brow, peering around the next corner. “Preoccupied, I expect,” he explains, with a sidelong glance. “Preparations to be made, you understand.” 

“Yeah, but you’d think there would be one guard still hanging around, right?”

“Boss!” Rita hisses, freezing in her tracks. “This is _just_ like that part in _The Nep_ \--”

“ _The Neptunian Hawkmoth_?” Juno interrupts. “Rita, you don’t have to bring it up every time, there’s plenty of other streams to pick from. Also, that doesn’t make any sense unless one of us pulls a doublecross and switches out the statue.” 

“I keep tellin’ you, but you’re still gettin’ it all confused. The moth statue’s just in the movie, boss, it ain’t real.” 

“Ah.” Lin hums, and Juno and Rita turn to see him staring at the next door panel with his lips pressed together in a thin line. “They changed the code.”

“Ooh, gimme a second, I know this one!” Rita sidles up to the door and keys in a code, tongue sticking out from between her teeth as she screws up her face in concentration. After a long, worrying instant, the door slides open. 

Juno and Lin rush through after her, into a dark hallway where every surface is carved with glowing hieroglyphs, the floor sloping gradually downwards. “Nice work,” he says in a low voice. “You get that passcode from Frannie?” 

“Frannie who?” Rita replies, blithely.

A little drop of Sarah Steel’s old poison churns in Juno’s stomach, but he bites his tongue. “Nevermind,” he mumbles. “Guess I was thinking about someone else.” 

She stops, and looks back to him, and Juno can’t tell if it’s the persistent glow around them that makes her eyes seem to flash behind her half-moon glasses. “If you say so, boss.” 

The vault door looms out of the shadows at the end of the hall, a huge silver facade carved with interwoven, overlapping faces in a meandering geometric pattern. Sightless eyes stare down menacingly at the pair of them. Lin grimaces and unfolds his penknife, sliding the blade across the pad of his thumb. 

Rita makes a quiet sound of disgust. Juno flinches. Lin grits his sharp teeth in a grimace, pressing his bloodied finger to one of the gaping mouths at the center of the door’s hieroglyph. The silver takes on a copper sheen, and then glows momentarily brighter. 

“I hate this place,” Juno mutters, wrinkling his nose. 

“Quite,” Lin agrees, stepping away and wiping his hand against one thigh. His eyes stay fixed on the door, apprehensively, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

But unlike the first lock, this one gives way; the interlocked mouths all slide open on unseen hinges, baring the entrance to the vault that houses all the collected treasures of the Solar Court. The biggest score in the universe. 

“Don’t,” Juno says, warningly, when Rita steps forward, her eyes wide. “It’s a trap.” She looks back at him, and he hesitates, and glances helplessly towards Lin, who furrows his brow. “I mean, it’s gotta be, right?” Rita crosses her arms over her chest and tilts her chin up, and it’s so familiar that he almost stops himself. 

“Looks safe to me, boss.”

“I didn’t mean the vault, Rita, I meant--” he cuts himself off, reaches for the space above his collarbone where an iron chain used to sit, and groans. “Rita, you’re fired.” 

There’s a moment of strained silence. “What? Mistah Steel, you can’t just--what did I _do_?” Her expression is guileless and wounded, eyes wide and watery.

“Goddamnit,” he says, the poison burning bitter in the back of his throat now. “Illusions, Lin, you said this place was full of them, but I never thought--Stupid!”

“Oh,” Lin says, quietly. “I’m afraid we were both mistaken, Detective.” 

“What do you mean?” she says, worriedly. “Illusion? Where? You’re going on about traps and now a lady can’t even trust her own eyes and you still haven’t explained how--”

“Stop it,” Juno snaps, “You’re not her, stop...using her like some kind of puppet, just--”

Rita makes a quiet, mournful sound, staring up at him like she’s been slapped, and Juno feels his throat close up. His eye darts away, just for a second, and when he blinks and looks back, she’s gone, as surely as if she was never there. Just a trick of the light.

Engstrom emerges from the mouth of the tunnel, his skeletal face set in a triumphant rictus. Lin’s upper lip curls in disgust, and he steps forward. 

“Juno, dear,” Lin announces, under his breath. “Go ahead into the vault. I’ll take care of this.” 

“Like hell!” 

“There’s no time, Detective, the alarm has already been raised, we need to move quickly.” He flicks out the penknife again, and Engstrom’s ghostly pale eyes snap to the blade. 

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for years, burglar” he says, hungrily. “High time I put you _in your place_.”

The vault sparkles with gold and platinum, glowing like the heart of a sun and just as deadly. “In!” Lin says breezily, over his shoulder, and shoves Juno towards the light. “Now. Please!”

Juno stumbles over the threshold and glances back in time to watch the door slam shut, cutting him off from Lin. “Goddamnit,” he shouts, throwing himself against the solid steel surface so the impact rattles through his shoulder. It doesn’t budge. “Lin!”

There’s an answering rattle from the other side of the door, a low thud and a muffled snarl. Juno’s blood runs cold, and he presses closer, listening intently. 

A low cackle echoes around the room, bouncing off the walls, and when Juno turns the room is already half filled with a cloud of familiar lavender smoke, thick and cloying. Valencia steps out of the fog, eyes flashing copper, dressed to kill. 

“Hello again, Detective,” she drawls, and goes for the throat. 

Juno ducks out of the way, tries to ram his already aching shoulder into her stomach but is pulled up short when she catches one of his arms and twists. Juno stumbles, lets out a sharp cry of pain, and stamps down on her foot, hard. 

Valencia snarls and steps back, and Juno swings a fist at her face. She rolls with the punch and gives him one to match.

She fights like he does, dirty and vicious. Pulls a blaster from her belt while they’re tangled together and nearly gets a shot off before he can jam an elbow into her side and twist the barrel away. 

They grapple for the blaster, straining and shoving, toe to toe, locked together in a parody of an embrace. No iron to pull him away. For a moment, Juno thinks he can go the distance. 

Valencia grits her teeth, and kicks him hard in the shin, and Juno’s bad leg buckles under his weight. He shouts as he goes down, and she follows through, shoving him back until his head slams hard against the wall. Juno’s vision swims, and he groans in pain.

“What happened to your pretty little secretary?” she taunts, while Juno tries and fails to bite at the hands clawing at his face. 

“Shut up,” he manages, before she knocks his head against the wall again and gets him into a chokehold.

"It doesn't matter if I let you go, you know,” she says conversationally, her arm digging sharply into Juno’s windpipe. “If I let you walk out that door with your prize and run back to the thief, you're gonna die anyway."

"What the hell are you talking about?" he snarls, breathless.

A ghastly smile plays over her lips. "You haven't figured it out yet? He's using you, Detective, to save his own skin."

Juno’s ears ring at the pronouncement, and he kicks his feet, struggling for air and clawing at her arm until it pulls away from his throat just a fraction of an inch. Valencia watches his face with an otherworldly, sadistic glee, keeping him pinned down. Juno grits his teeth and throws it back in her face, rasping, "He's really not,” with a confidence he suddenly doesn’t feel. 

The problem with decades of detective work is that he can never just leave things alone. He’s built up the habit now. A thousand probing questions and evasive answers and moments of hesitation all crystallize in his mind, items on a list that’s so much longer than it should be of reasons not to trust Jasper Lin. Reasons he’s been systematically ignoring in favor of jumping in headfirst. Trusting too much in that dizziness in his head and the stumbling staccato of his heart and not enough in that poisonous, bitter paranoia that’s kept him alive so long. 

Juno pulls air tinged with lavender smoke into his burning lungs, and stares Valencia down with his one watering eye, and tries not to believe it. 

"So he doesn't know your name?"

Juno's quiet. Valencia laughs.

"That's what I thought,” she tells him, saccharine, and steps away, dropping him to his knees and training her blaster to the left of his eye. “He’s a marked man, your thief, and unless he can find someone to take his place there’s nowhere he can run where his fate won’t catch up with him. But he’s sweet talked you into giving yourself up, and all that’s left to do is hand you over and walk free.”

“Stop it,” Juno protests, without feeling. 

“You're gonna love Nos Galen Gaeaf. The spectacle is really something--once in a lifetime."

Stomach churning with dread, Juno tears his gaze away from her smiling face to the treasure trove all around them. “This isn’t the sacrifice,” he murmurs, in realization. 

“The baubles are just window dressing,” she confirms, the smoke trailing from her lips. “ _He’s_ the sacrifice.”

Juno looks back to her, blankly, staring down the barrel of her blaster. “Why are you telling me all this, anyway?” he sighs. 

She laughs, cocking the gun. “I just like to see you squirm, honey.” 

It strikes Juno just how far from home he is, and how alone, and how utterly fucked, and he goes from tired to angry in the span of a heartbeat. He keeps trying, again and again, and every time he ends up right back here again, at the end of his rope. “You gonna shoot that thing, or were you planning to monologue me to death?”

“No hard feelings,” Valencia croons, and blows a smoke ring. “But it’s like I said, it doesn’t matter what I do. You’re already spoken for.” 

She drops the blaster to the ground, where it spins wildly and comes to rest with the barrel pointing at Hollis Carter’s golden rose, still wilting in its bowl. She winks, and walks right past Juno to the door, which slides open in a series of clicks and whirrs. The smoke rises around her until it obscures her form entirely. 

When it clears again, Lin is standing in the shadowed antechamber, haloed with red light, his face ashy and his eyes flickering like a lit match. The front of his shirt is dark with blood. His hands are stained crimson.

Juno clears his throat. “You...uh. Heard all that, huh?” 

Lin opens his mouth, and hesitates, looking younger than Juno has ever seen him. 

Juno shifts uncomfortably, still on his knees, and sets his jaw tight. “Was she lying?” 

The fairy sets his jaw in a way that tells him everything he needs to know. When he speaks, his voice is thin and rasping. “I...I am sorry, Juno.” 

Juno laughs, bitterly, breathlessly. “Don’t worry about it. I get a lot more death threats than second dates.” 

He’s not surprised when Lin only turns away, disappearing into the shadows. Leaving Juno alone in the dark. It’s the way things always seem to go in this place, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello i've had a hell of a busy two weeks trying to finish off the semester and also catch up on this fic and NOW i have the hiccups but luckily nothing has gone horribly wrong, yeah?


	13. 12. thorns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> About names, freely given.

Juno moves in a kind of trance, barely aware of how he manages to find his feet again. Stumbling through the twisting maze of corridors like a sleepwalker, no thought in his head but to move away from the place he left behind and towards whatever comes his way. Not knowing whether he’ll find Rita before something else finds him. Trying not to think about it, honestly. 

He clutches Carter’s rose like a lifeline, one of the thorns digging sharply into the soft meat of his thumb. He doesn’t really know what he plans to do with it. 

Hell, there is no plan, not anymore. There are goals, in the short and the long term, goals that Juno will start working towards just as soon as he can find a foothold somewhere in the black void that surrounds him. Find Rita. Get her back. _Don’t die._

Figure out what to do about the fairy with the pretty face who’s got his fingers curled tight around Juno’s heart, ready to tear it out with a word. Find his way out of another one of these impossible, deadly webs he’s always getting himself tangled in. Play another one of those games where everybody loses no matter what the outcome is. 

He ducks around the next corner, one hand pressed to the smooth glass of the wall, and shuts his eye. “Goddamnit,” he breathes, raggedly. “God fucking damn it. “

There’s no answer from the darkness, except for the distorted whisper of his own voice echoing back. 

Juno listens, and aches for even a glimmer of something familiar or true or real or even all three. And after a moment, he does what he always seems to fall back on in situations like this, and sinks slowly to the ground, face in the dirt. 

He half expects to hear the distant roar of a hoverbike engine approaching, and sits up gradually as the echo turns into a rumble, and then to the indistinct murmur of a faraway voice.

“--gotta be over this way, the signal off his comms is pointin’ me t--”

Juno strains to hear, shifting upright by degrees, digging for the stolen blaster and the wilting rose and brandishing both cautiously. 

“--aren’t any monsters lurking around these creepy dark corners, right? I mean, it’s just I saw this movie the other week, _Planets With Teeth_ , where Venus had these enormous sand-sharks just under the surface, big enough to swallow a whole _house_ \--”

Juno’s heart turns over in his chest, and he bites down hard on his tongue to keep from shouting out. He’s an idiot and he knows it, but he won’t be a dumb sucker who falls for the same trick twice in one day. He sucks in a breath and shifts slowly backwards, slinking back the direction that he came. 

Works pretty well, too, until his foot catches a rock. There’s a discordant clatter as the stone skids across the surface of the tunnel, and all the breath leaves his lungs in a terrified gasp. 

“What was that?” Rita’s illusory voice hisses, and a light clicks on, scatters over the stones until it finds Juno and freezes. There’s an eerily familiar shout, and Juno glances up, before he can think better of it, to see her silhouetted at the end of the tunnel. “Mistah Steel?”

“Shut up,” he grunts, covers his ears, turns away. “Shut up, go away, Rita, you’re fired. You’re _fired_! I’m firing you!” 

The phantom Rita lets out a delighted squeal, jumps up and down and takes off running in his direction. “Oh, boss it really _is_ you!”

In this upside-down nest of a city where nothing is real or safe, he feels his foot come down, for the first time in a long time, firmly on solid ground. Juno stumbles back to let the wall take his weight as he chokes out a short, manic burst of laughter. His knees buckle, and he falls forward into her arms, feeling scattered and vulnerable and entirely undone. Rita’s arms wrap around him, constricting and forcing another giggle out along with the rest of the air in his chest. 

Juno reaches up to hold her close with all his might, and buries his face in her unkempt curls, and laughs without breath, face wet with tears. “God, Rita,” he chokes. “Oh my god.” 

She sniffles and stays put, hugging him so tight that all the gravity in the universe couldn’t wrench them apart, and squeezes in just the right way to make one of his ribs crack a little with the strain. “Mistah Steel, oh, you wouldn’t _believe _the week I’ve had, that lady with the cigarette and that hotel with all those hallways and _no room service_! I’m gonna need a long vacation on a beach somewhere with a big drink that’s got one of those tiny little umbrellas in it.” __

__Laughing makes a bubble burst in Juno’s chest, and suddenly he’s weeping, tears blurring the only working eye he has left._ _

__Still, he can see clear enough through the haze that when he looks up and over her shoulder at his other savior, he feels that solid ground beneath him crumble and fall away again. Juno scrubs at his face and leaves the embrace slowly, succumbing to the steady drag of the current that’s going to pull him under. “It’s good to see you, Rita,” he says, with a miserable smile._ _

__“And then you finally pick up, and just after you called I got stuck _again_ in one of those revolving door traps, and I kept going all around in circles for hours trying to get back to you and I probably would have been stuck there forever and ever if your friend hadn’t showed up--” _ _

__She looks tired like he’s never seen her before, glasses sitting crooked with a little hairline fracture through one lens, but her face is as bright as ever. When she sees the rose, she lets out a little shriek. “You got it back! Oh, boss, thank you! I knew you could do it.”_ _

__Juno tries to summon up a laugh, but Lin’s pitch-dark eyes are boring into him from the doorway and it makes him feel like he’s turning to stone, hollowed out and frozen in place. He’s prey, he’s caught and cornered, he’s a goddamn butterfly pinned to a card, and he can’t even stop his rabbit heart pounding out of his chest with the memory of those lips hot against his throat._ _

__He forces his gaze away, looks back to Rita. “I’m sorry.”_ _

__She pats at his shoulder and smiles. “Aw, hey, it’s alright, Mistah Steel. We beat ‘em, and we’re here and we’re okay, and we can go home.”_ _

__“No, Rita, I’m sorry. I fucked up, I’m sorry I got us into this mess, I didn’t mean to--”_ _

__“Stop apologizing like that, Boss, you’re scaring me a little.”_ _

__“I won’t run,” Juno says, voice raw. “Okay? Just let her go, and I’ll be your damn patsy or whatever it is you want from me. You got me. I fell for it, you win. Fair’s fair, or whatever. But I want my best friend safe.”_ _

__Rita pulls away from him, stricken. “Mistah Steel, you _didn’t_.”_ _

__Lin’s face is still and hard as glass and his eyes are gold coins and his mouth is wide and bloodred and the shadows shift around his feet like branches in an invisible wind, and he stands impassive in the doorway with his arms crossed. “Why do you think I brought her to you in the first place, hmm?”_ _

__Juno nods, all the words dried up on his tongue. Rita glances between the two of them for the next half-second it takes her to put it together, then stands and turns to march back over to the doorway. “You let me and my boss go right this second, you big long streak of--”_ _

__“I am,” Lin interjects, quietly, and repeats it again, eyes flickering to Juno, posture falling into one of abject contrition. “I am.”_ _

__“O-oh,” Rita says, winding down from her burst of indignant rage. “Well...okay.”_ _

__“What?”_ _

__“It was a mistake,” he says, primly, and his eyes fade back to their human glamour, bright and desolate. “Luring you here. Taking your name. And I mean...I mean not to go through with it. So I give it back to you, Juno Steel. Your name is your own.”_ _

__Kneeling on the ground, Juno barks out a bitter laugh. “You can’t expect me to believe that.”_ _

__“Believe what you will,” Lin sighs, “It seems you always do.”_ _

__“What about our deal?” Juno says grimly. “I’m not stupid, Lin, I know you gave me more than enough rope to hang myself in that bargain, and I took it because I didn’t have any other options. Just tell me what I owe you already and take your goddamn pound of flesh, you asshole.”_ _

__He takes one step closer to Juno, looks at him sidelong for a moment and purses his lips. “Consider the payment waived.”_ _

__“Waived?”_ _

__“It’s a common legal term, Detective, it simply means I don’t feel that the deal was well struck, and that I will therefore refrain from enforcing the agreed-upon fee--”_ _

__“I know what it means,” Juno grunts, climbing to his feet. “I just don’t know why you’re doing it.”_ _

__Rita moves between them, quick on her small feet. “I don’t like it, boss. Don’t you listen to him.”_ _

__Lin throws up his hands. “Miss Rita, please, if you would allow me to--”_ _

__“If you want my friend you’re gonna have to go through me first, Mister,” Rita growls at him._ _

__“I understand you completely, my dear.” Lin takes a step back again, his hands still raised in an awkward half-surrender. “But I have one more condition to fulfill, if the both of you will permit me.” He looks between them, with his soft and handsome face drawn and haggard, his facade of cool invulnerability giving way to a strange desperation. “I made you a promise, Juno, to help you and your secretary return home when this was over. I can guide you safely out of this city. Miss Rita, I can lead you back to your ship, I can--”_ _

__He cuts himself off at the sight of whatever answer he finds in Juno’s face, looks briefly pained and quickly smothers his expression in careful neutrality. “You don’t trust me,” Lin says. “I understand, of course. But you’ll never make it out of this place on your own, thief-taker. The whole court is on the hunt. Nos Galan Gaeaf is hours away.”_ _

__Juno looks to Rita. “Guess we’ll just have to chance it,” he says, flatly._ _

__Lin makes a quiet sound of discontent, and runs an anxious hand through his dark hair. Then he forces the mask of composure back into place, and his voice barely wavers when he asks, “What can I do to make you trust me?”_ _

__Juno’s quiet, aware of every shaking beat of his foolish heart. Wanting to feel angry, or hurt, or afraid. Mostly just feeling numb. “I don’t know.”_ _

__The fairy thief sighs, long and low. “Well. That is disappointing.” He presses his lips together, thin and white, and says, soft and clipped. “Then I suppose all I can do is offer you a gift in kind.”_ _

__“Lin, please, just don’t--”_ _

__“My name,” he interrupts, quickly. “Is Peter Nureyev. There. You have it.”_ _

__Juno bites his tongue. Rita gasps. “Oh, boss…”_ _

__“And at one time, I was a very young and foolish thief, trying to make my way in the world. I was...rash, and I found myself obligated to remain here, with the Solar Court.” He quirks his lips, sadly. “It would be a quite tolerable situation, actually, barring a certain sticky clause, which Engstrom’s assistant so kindly revealed to you.”_ _

__“The sacrifice,” Juno mumbles, and Rita latches onto his arm like a small anchor._ _

__“Yes, quite. It’s supposed to be quite an honor, to be chosen, you know. Others have killed for the privilege. Personally I can’t see the appeal. It comes as a nasty surprise, thinking you’ve only traded away your freedom and finding that you’ve almost certainly traded away your life in the bargain.”_ _

__“You really didn’t know much about fairies when you joined up, huh?”_ _

__Nureyev looks a little abashed. “I was at a loss,” he continues. “Twice, I was lucky enough to be passed over. I thought, perhaps, if I made myself indispensable enough, I might put it off another seven years...but I heard the rumors begin to fly around the court as the festival loomed closer, and I…” he breaks off. “You know the rest.”_ _

__“You got desperate,” Juno finishes for him. “Yeah, that tracks. But why me? Or was I just the first sucker stupid enough to ask you for a favor?”_ _

__His stare fixes on the rose in Juno’s palm, and Nureyev turns his head to the side, thoughtfully. “It was your eye, I think,” he muses. “The way you stared down the big, mean world, like you were daring it to blink first. And then it was simply convenient, how you needed help and so did I. And then, gradually, it all rather stopped mattering.”_ _

__Nureyev swallows, and his eyes search Juno’s face, waiting with bated breath for some answer Juno doesn’t know how to give him. Rita looks between them, considering, and after a moment lets go of Juno’s hand._ _

__“You wanna help this guy, boss?”_ _

__Juno closes his eye against a wave of dizziness and exhaustion uncertainty, and shrugs._ _

__“You think we can trust him?”_ _

__Juno sighs. “I...maybe, yeah.”_ _

__“Okay.” Rita steps forward. “You betta lead the way, then, Mistah Nureyev. We’ll find room on that ship for one more.”_ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HM i thought there would be another scene on this one but the wordcount and pacing seems to be pushing it back a bit so give me! some time to work out how i'm organizing the next two chapters! i will move as fast as i can! I just want em to be...good


	14. 13. dusk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Escape from Valles Marineris, and what comes next.

When they break the surface again, Valles Marineris is transformed. 

The evening sun is dipping below the far wall of the canyon, at the edge of their vision, and every mile of jagged wasteland in between is studded with thousands of tiny lights, glittering like fireflies or distant stars. 

The light reflects off the polished-dark surface of volcanic stone, setting the whole valley aglow. More like a storybook forest at night than the lights of a city like Hyperion. The way the glittering specks move is strange, trancelike. Juno’s lost, for a moment, taking it all in. 

Nureyev startles visibly at the sight, staring out over the galaxy of little lights like he can’t decide whether to run towards them or away. “Take a long look,” he whispers, glancing sidelong at his companions, with a quick, mirthless grin. “I believe the two of you might be the first to see this in a century and live to tell.” 

Juno cranes his ear to hear a distant strain of song, the barest whisper of a tune on the wind. Something worldless, and full of longing. The timbre of the music turns his blood to ice. “Let’s leave it off the record until we survive officially, yeah?” 

Rita swats at his arm, and then grips tight to the sleeve of his coat, announcing, “I’m not dyin’ here and neither are you, boss, let’s get that straight.” 

“Alright, then,” Nureyev says, clearing his throat. “First, we’ll need to disappear.” 

*

The poker-chip disc clatters over the stones, a conspicuous tinny rattle interrupting the distant echoing song. A pair of booted feet pause in their march, and break away from the path. A masked face bends toward the ground. 

Peter Nureyev moves like a shadow, slamming the hilt of a knife against a stranger’s temple, holding them down with a foot pressed to the back of their neck until they stop struggling and go limp. 

Rita has her hands over her face, but she peeks out at the scene from between her fingers anyway, watches Nureyev drag the motionless body back towards the pair of them, out of sight of the street. “Mistah Steel…” she whispers, sternly. 

“Yeah.” Juno looks away with a sigh. “Yeah, I know.” 

She sniffs. “I'm just glad he’s on our side, is all, boss.”

“Come along, you two. Get dressed,” Nureyev says, tilting his head toward the three bodies piled up together. uniforms in a black that glitters like beetle wings. Masks with too many eyes, faces crowded on top of each other like something Juno might have seen on one of the worse experimental binges of his twenties.

Juno wrinkles his nose. Rita pulls off one of the masks and slides it over her own face, replacing her grin with a grim many-mouthed maw. “How do I look?” she whispers, gleefully.

Juno shrugs on one of the black beetle-wing jackets, too tight across the shoulders and too long in the hem. “I feel like an idiot,” he grunts.

“Please, the uniform does wonders for your figure, dear,” Nureyev says, glib, like he can’t quite help himself. His eyes dart away when Juno looks to him, a teasing smile slipping from his face. 

Juno snorts dryly, and grabs another mask.

They form a line, the fairy thief taking the lead and Juno bringing up the rear, picking their way cautiously over the stones to the parade route. The walls of the canyon rise around them, steeper and sharper as they make for the epicenter. A skyline like jaws closing gradually around them. 

Between one moment and the next, they’ve stepped into the thick of it, blending seamlessly into the crowd of faceless strangers. A march like a rushing river through the ancient riverbed at the center of the city. Valles Marineris is on the move.

Juno falls in step, his neck prickling with cold, bare without the comforting weight of his old iron chain. Sweat beads down his face under the mask. But he feels his heartbeat keeping time with the steady footfalls of the crowd around him, feels a sickeningly familiar tug. The numbing sense of being one grain of sand in a vast storm. A tiny, insignificant piece of something unfathomably large. _Give up control--_

Rita’s hand brushes against his and then squeezes, softly. Juno looks out at her from behind his mask, and finds the glint of her eyes, and breathes. 

“Everything’s so quiet, boss,” she says, leaning closer as her voice wavers a little. “I can’t stand it.” 

Nureyev doesn’t look back, but his posture shifts just a fraction, hesitating mid-stride. “Nearly there now,” he says, so softly that Juno looks to Rita to make sure he didn’t imagine it. 

A mechanical, shifting movement begins somewhere further along the line, hands reaching back and then up again. A clicking and a whirring and the gentle flickering of a hundred thousand lights being raised to the dark sky. The glow washes over the crowd in their masks and uniforms, catching on strange angles and casting stranger, inhuman shadows in the spaces between them. Nureyev pulls Engstrom’s babylon candle from his coat, and holds it up. His face is superimposed with carved teeth and tongues and flashing eyes, but his own pair go chatoyant gold under the light. 

In the new light, Juno can make out the hulking outline of a row of ships against the backdrop of the canyon wall. The crowd pushes toward them, moving as one, silent and single-minded. 

The three of them are carried along, step by step, pressing closer to one another as they approach the waiting armada. 

“Miss Rita,” Nureyev whispers, his voice echoing strangely muffled through the mask. “Which way to your ship?”

She steps ahead, standing on tiptoe to peer over the crowd. “I left Frannie just over here,” she determines, gesturing to the space between two of the huge, looming spacecraft. 

Juno scowls. “Why can’t we just take that teleport thing?” he grunts. 

Nureyev makes a noise at the back of his throat, and turns the babylon candle over in his gloved hand. “Yes, the idea had occurred to me. But the charge is running quite low, I’m afraid, there may be just enough power remaining for a short jump before it fizzles out entirely. A thousand meters or so.” 

“So we jump ourselves over there onto the ship,” he hisses. “The faster we get away from this crowd, the better.” 

“Mm, yes,” Nureyev says, tersely, “I take your point. But there are too many eyes here. Even a slight miscalculation of our landing position could prove very awkward, under the circumstances.” 

“C’mon, Nureyev, what’s life without a little risk?”

“Oh, longer, generally, if that’s what you’re after.” 

A handful of masked faces swivel in their direction, and both Juno and Nureyev bite their tongues, before silently nodding and beginning the long trek across the open square. Rita shifts until she’s standing at Juno’s right side and shuffles nervously to keep up. 

“Keep walking,” the fairy urges, under his breath. “Don’t stop for anything. Don’t look back.” 

Juno keeps his head down and his shoulders square, taking one step after another. Holding his breath. The crowd gets steadily sparser as the procession moves up the slipway and onto the ships. As they pass beneath its looming shadow. 

The worst thing is, they almost make it. 

“You’re late.”

The raspy voice rings out sudden in the eerie silence. The back of Juno’s neck breaks out in gooseflesh as he places the familiar timbre of it. “Thief,” the Queen says, lilting and soft and a clear, implicit threat. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.” 

Rita makes a muffled noise that Juno knows means she’s biting down hard on a whimper. He resists the urge to reach for her, staying quiet and slowing to a standstill. Glancing to the side, where Nureyev has frozen as though rooted to the spot. It takes a moment of long silence for Juno to recognize that he _can’t_ move, watching his lithe legs tremble with the exertion of attempting to take another step, the growing desperation in his dark eyes. And then, a moment after that, watching the desperation replaced with a strange calm. His back goes ramrod straight. One of his hands reaches up and slowly peels away the mask, revealing the shadows under his eyes and the tight pinch of his mouth, his dark hair half-plastered to his forehead in disarray. “My Lady.” 

High above them the crowd parts, and a woman with silver hair and liver-spotted skin nearly pale enough to be completely translucent steps into view. Her face is papery and blank in a way that makes Juno wonder what’s hiding underneath it, and immediately wish he hadn’t. 

In the split second before Nureyev turns to face her, he locks his gaze onto Juno’s face, shakes his head the barest fraction of an inch. _Go_ , he mouths, silently.

“I suppose this isn’t what it looks like,” the Queen says, expectantly. Her voice carries a chill like a bucket of ice water, all shocking and terrible and raw. 

Nureyev smiles one of his toothy, genial smiles. “And what does it look like?” 

Juno grits his jaw tight, forces himself to keep walking forward, deeper into the shadow.

“You’ve been hiding from me. You would be a fool if you think there is any place in this galaxy you could run that I would not find you. But I know you are not a fool.” 

“My sincerest apologies for my absence, Highness.” he demurs. “I was delayed. You see, I brought you a gift.” 

Juno stumbles mid-stride, and stops cold. Rita sucks in an audible breath. 

But a long moment passes, and the masked figures don’t close in around them. They don’t even turn to look. Juno glances back, and sees Nureyev in a deep bow, proudly brandishing Hollis Carter’s golden rose. 

Instinctively, Juno’s hand flies to his pocket, and closes around something much smoother and heavier. Frowning, he withdraws the babylon candle, still flickering faintly. “Shit,” he breathes. He hadn’t even felt Nureyev switch them out. 

“Mistah Steel?” Rita’s fingers brush against his, and he looks up into her wide eyes. “What are we gonna do?” 

Juno turns like he’s wading through sand, looking forward to escape and safety and home, and then looking back to Peter Nureyev, doing something noble and stupid. Saving his life again, piling debt on top of debt that Juno doesn’t know how he’ll ever repay. He looks to Rita, eye wide, and can’t figure out which way to move. 

“Take him,” the Queen announces, and Nureyev’s shape is obscured in an instant, surrounded and overwhelmed by the faceless horde, and the choice is made for him. “We have a tithe to pay.”

*

It’s a tiny ship, more of a lunar hauler than a true interstellar vessel. A few folding berths stacked on top of each other, a small cabin, a cockpit with ceilings so low that only Rita could fit it comfortably. 

Juno folds himself into one of the seats and stares blankly around at the bare walls and overturned crates decorating the cabin while Rita chats idly with the ship’s computer. After a minute or two, she goes quiet, sinks down into the chair opposite. 

“Mistah Steel,” she says, somberly. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy fairy magic in the last couple of days, but I don’t think any of that stuff gave me the ability to read your mind. You wanna tell me what the plan is?”

The babylon candle is heavy and cold in Juno’s hands. He stares at the shifting pattern of light flickering across the surface. “Honestly?” he groans. “I’m not sure I know anymore.” 

“What’s gonna happen to Mistah Nureyev? If you don’t mind me askin’--”

“You know, maybe I kinda do mind,” Juno says, irritably. “Maybe I’m sick and tired of wandering around this…this nightmare of a city, solving riddles and making deals and running for my life because I don’t know what I’m doing, and every time I start to think that maybe I might not lose this time someone changes all the rules and knocks the board out from under me. Maybe I just want to forget all about it and go home, alright?” 

“Boss, don’t you take this out on me,” Rita snaps right back. “I’m tryin’ to help you, because you asked for my help earlier, back in that tunnel, remember? And if you don’t want me to help you any more, you just gotta say so, and not by actin’ like it’s my fault you’re upset, because I haven’t had a real great week either.” 

“I…” Juno swallows, and pushes down his defensive streak. “Yeah. Sorry.” 

“So.” Rita sits up in her chair. “You take some time to think about it, and figure out what you wanna do, okay, boss? And you come let me know, because I’ve been tracking those fairy ships on my comms and it shouldn’t take me too long to catch up if that’s what you wanna do. Or we could turn around and head back to Hyperion City, I ain’t choosy.”

Juno manages a thin smile. “I missed you.”

“Aw, boss,” she sighs, and wraps her arms around him in a quick, firm hug. “You’re my best friend too, you know.”

Juno nods, his throat too tight to reply properly, and she lets go, ducking away into the next room. 

Juno looks at the babylon candle. 

Peter Nureyev is a thief and a liar and a monster. Peter Nureyev has lips like silk and eyes bright enough to outshine the whole galaxy. Peter Nureyev had Juno’s heart in his hands, all bloody and raw and unguarded, and he let it go, and Juno _still can’t understand why he did it._

He clutches the babylon candle tighter, and something twists in this grip, gears shifting and spinning, and for a terrifying moment he thinks it’s cracked in two. But it only swivels, one side unscrewing from the other just far enough to let a scrap of paper slip out from inside of the mechanism. 

Juno catches it as it falls, because he’s always been too curious for his own good. 

Peter Nureyev has handwriting like a painstakingly forged legal document, flowery curling script gone a little slanted and spidery at the edges with haste. Juno wonders when he had time to write it, whether he was scrawling behind his back somehow. With Nureyev, anything seems possible. 

_Thief-taker._

_I wasn’t entirely honest with you before, when I called off our deal. The truth is you’ve already repaid me ten times over. You gave me rare and priceless gift, something I had gone without for many years. You helped me to remember who I am._

_Thank you for the adventure._

_Yours,_

_Peter Nureyev_

Juno reads it over half a dozen times, his jaw clenched tight, his pulse pounding in his ears. When he finds his feet again, he stands, turns and marches directly for the cockpit. “Rita,” he says, hoarsely. “You still up for a last-ditch doomed rescue?” 

She grins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY i've been so dang busy and also my laptop keyboard has some kinda Symptoms Disorder which makes typing tedious and complicated but! here we are hitting the home stretch! back into that ballad! finally


	15. 14. nos galan gaeaf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _And pleasant is the Fairy-land, but an eerie tale to tell_
> 
> _For at the end o' seven years, we pay a tithe to hell--_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: graphic violence, canon-typical peril - see end notes

Juno rescues the burner comms unit from the lining of his trenchcoat, where it had long ago slipped through a hole inside one of the pockets, to be lost to time. 

The casing is worn and scratched like it’s survived a sandstorm, which statistically Juno supposes it has. There are thin spiderweb fractures across the surface of the screen, and when Juno prods clumsily at the interface it’s slower than usual to respond. 

Painstakingly, he finds the single number programmed into the contacts. Makes the call. 

There’s a long, worrying silence on the other line, and then the deliberate sound of a man clearing his throat.

“Hey, uh. Big Guy. It’s--”

“I know who you are, Juno.” 

Juno sighs. “Yeah. Well, I’m calling it in now.”

The man on the other line makes a thoughtful sound. “Very well. Tell me where you are and I will be there momentarily to aid you.”

“Not me,” he corrects, quickly. “Someone else.”

“I...see.” 

Juno tells him a story. He keeps it short, unsure of his footing, filling in the gaps as best he can.

“I see,” the Big Guy repeats. 

“So?” Juno says, expectantly. “How do I stop it?”

“You can’t.”

A wave of cold fear trickles down his spine, and Juno sinks into himself, clutching the comms tight to his ear. “Bullshit I can’t! Come on, tell me what to do.” 

“There is nothing you can do. His soul is beyond your reach. I am sorry, Juno, but this man you love is going to die.” 

“That’s not--” Juno stammers, voice turning harsh and cold even to his own ears. “Don’t.” 

“I am sorry,” he says again, solemnly. “Would you like me to hang up now?” 

“No. No! ...please. Please, okay?” Juno perches on the edge of his seat, one knee bouncing as he leans forward. “I just need a chance. I have to try. I owe him that much, alright? He gave me something…important. It doesn’t matter what,” he adds, hurriedly. 

The man on the other line’s voice changes. “You have his name?” 

Juno grits his teeth. “I didn’t say--”

“That changes things. If you do have his name, there might be a way forward after all.” 

Juno clamps one hand on his knee to still its erratic movement, swallows. “Well, what is it?” 

The Other hesitates. “It will be very dangerous.”

“Just tell me what to do.” 

“There is every likelihood the both of you will die.” 

Juno stands in one motion, carried to his feet with a wave of resolve. “Big Guy, I swear if you don’t--”

“While the Queen owns his true name,” he explains, calmly, and Juno stills. ”He is out of your reach. But she will have to abandon her claim on him during the ceremony, in order to offer him to the night court. It will be a very short window, but if you could get there first and lay claim to him before the other court has a chance…it might be enough to save him.”

The line is quiet save for the occasional crackle of static. Juno worries his lower lip between his teeth, narrows his eye. “What are my odds, here?” 

“I do not think it will encourage you to hear those numbers, Detective.”

He sucks in a low, steadying breath. “Great. Okay. How do I, uh. Do that?” 

“There will be a test. You will know when it has begun.” 

*

Outside the window, everything is cold and quiet, and empty until it isn’t. The fairy armada looms dark and endless below them, encircling a wide ring of asteroids, blotting out the stars.

“I’ve been lookin’ around, Mistah Steel, and I couldn’t find one single record of this place anywhere, you know. It’s like it all just disappears into thin air and comes back again specially, just for this one night.” 

Juno stares down at the grim tableau, turning the mask over in his hands. “This is a bad idea,” he says, dryly. “Right?” 

Rita blinks owlishly up at him from the pilot’s seat. “I thought that was kinda our whole deal, boss.” She flicks half a dozen switches in quick succession, brings their ship low over one of the enormous black flagships. Juno hears a rattling hiss as something connects. “You’ll be back here with Mistah Nureyev all safe and sound before you know it,” she promises, and adds, “Probably.” 

Juno grimaces, and slides the mask back over his face with a low click. Cold sweat is beading on his skin, and his stomach churns unpleasantly. He turns away from the window and toward the escape hatch, heart in his throat. 

“Good luck,” Rita says, and without missing a beat continues, “Go get him, Mistah Steel. ” 

*

Juno keeps to the shadows. 

The walls are flat silvery steel, like liquid mercury made solid. He startles when he catches a twisted reflection of his masked face in the polished surface. Disguises sit strangely on Juno’s skin. He’s never known how to be anyone but himself, even hidden behind a mask. 

Somewhere, close enough to echo down the long hall but too far to make out distinctly, there’s music. Real fairy music, the kind Ben always dreamed about dancing to, all otherworldly and sinister and soft. It pulls at his feet, sets him marching to the tempo without realizing it. 

Juno tries not to listen, not to follow the sound, and shudders when he feels his body rebel and override his brain’s better judgement. His feet move of their own accord, carrying him closer to danger like a hawkmoth to a flame. 

Someone is singing, close by, and when Juno ducks around the next corner he finds them -- a small cluster of the ethereal passengers, masks discarded, eerie smiles across their blank, beautiful faces. Dancing and twirling in the cold light. 

Juno walks closer and then beyond them, one step at a time, keeping the graceful turn of their bodies in his blind spot. The music still enthralls his ears, though, and it’s a near thing, grappling with the urge to turn back until the next step finally carries him out of earshot. 

Then, he hears the hunting horn blow. 

He presses his back to the wall and breathes, shakily, one hand slipping to the blaster at his hip more for a measure of confidence than anything. No point trying to shoot his way out of this one. 

Stealing a glance around the corner, Juno sees a crowd stretching from one end of a huge antechamber to the other, sprawling balconies high above the miasma of bodies. A narrow raised gangway bisecting the center of the room, leading out from the heart of the ship to a ten-foot circular airlock in the far wall.

Juno knows a mob when he sees one, and this crowd is whipped into a frenzy. He can see the excitement in their restless shifting, hear it in their thousands of overlapping voices. See the bloodlust in their shining white eyes. 

It’s happening, he thinks, and soon. 

His gaze flicks back up to the balcony and catches the woman leaning over the side with an imperious expression on her pallid face. Silver hair, thin lips, piercing eyes, a heavy ceremonial-looking crown in obsidian glass resting low on her brow. The Queen watches over her court like an exterminator peeling up a rotting baseboard. Like she’s watching a swarm of ants stray too close to her path, and wondering idly whether to step around or crush them underfoot. 

Somewhere close by comes the sound of a heavy door slamming, and the low murmur of excited voices rises to a clamor. 

"Open it," says the Queen suddenly, her cold voice magnified by some unseen force, and Juno watches the shadowy-bright figures crowd eagerly against the gangway, glowing eyes catching the light like a hundred mirrors. There's a mechanical whirr as the airlock begins to slide open. The outer layer of it is glass, or something polished like it, showing every distant point of light in the empty space just beyond.

Juno's tears his gaze away from the sea of stars when the miasma of mute figures parts to reveal a more familiar form. A tall man in radiant white, making his way slowly down the gangway, staring doggedly forward, his head held high. There's a gold circlet resting in his dark hair, gold in his ears and gold at his wrists and his throat. A single gold rose in his lapel. Nureyev outshines all the rest of the stars combined.

Straining on tiptoe to look, Juno peels away the mask, fumbling a little, and he shoves it hurriedly back under the folds of his coat before his shaking fingers lose their grip entirely.

Ten feet from the airlock, and Nureyev looks like something that Juno couldn't touch if he tried. Eight feet, and his back is to Juno, and Juno wants to try.

Five feet, and Juno is going to stand here and watch him _die--_

The procession turns as one while Juno's feet carry him over the floor as fast as they can, while he flings himself as hard as he can at the gangway and clambers onto it, while he shoves his way through a crowd of fairies and runs to Peter Nureyev, who’s waiting with one foot over the threshold and a look on his face like someone's sunk a fist into his gut.

In the absolute shocked silence after Juno darts forward and wraps his arms around Nureyev's neck, there's a furious scream, and a heavy thud, and the airlock closes behind the pair of them like a thunderclap.

Juno's face tilts dangerously towards his, and Nureyev shoves him away, staggering back, pale with terror. "What are you _doing here_ \--"

"I'm not letting them take you."

"They've taken me already! It's too late for me, don't you see that--"

"You're still alive, aren't you? So am I. That counts for something!"

"You--" Nureyev take a step toward him. "-- _impossible_ idiot."

"Yeah." It was about time Juno owned up to that. He tilts his chin up. "Together?"

Peter's lips crash into his an instant before the glass melts away, one brief moment where Juno can convince himself he's won before the two of them are whipped off the platform and dragged out into space.

*

From behind the inner wall, the court watches. 

The two figures fall away, growing steadily smaller as they drift closer to the distant spinning stones at the edge of the ring. The figure in white is wrapped around the other as they both seize and gasp for air, the cold vacuum blistering their skin in delicate patterns of frost. With the last of his breath, the smaller figure chokes out a name, barely visible to the assembled host by the soundless movement of his lips. The figure in white pulls him even closer.

The crowd parts to let the Queen forward, the faint impact of her footfalls echoing in the dull silence of the chamber. Her thin lips press firmly together, and she snaps her fingers. 

“Break his hold,” she orders the assembly, matter-of-factly.

A whispering current of energy takes hold in every corner of the room, steadily growing until the steel walls of the ship begin to vibrate with the force. The court shares one mind, and a deep and powerful magic, older than the stars. Their magic is a jealous one. 

In the growing distance, the figure in white begins to change. 

*

Juno’s beginning to black out with his head pressed into Peter Nureyev’s chest, thinking fuzzily that there are plenty of worse ways to die, when he feels the claws dig into his back. 

He flinches in shock and pain, eye blinking open, and sees a row of jagged teeth coming towards his face. The arms that wrap around him are a heavy crushing force, matted fur and coagulated blood and a vicious roar that carries somehow even through the soundless void loud enough to make Juno’s ears ring. The claws tear at his back like blunt knives, forcing an agonized scream from his mouth. He has barely half a second to marvel that he can find the breath to scream, before ducking his head away as the jaws snap shut barely a whisper from tearing his throat out. 

The monster that used to be Peter growls and bares its teeth again, and Juno’s body tries to pull away without giving him a say in the matter. It’s a nice surprise to realize at this late hour that he might have a survival instinct, after all. But he overpowers it, sets his jaw as the beast’s teeth sink into his shoulder and keeps his arms wrapped tight around the thing that’s killing him. 

The instant he starts fighting back, it changes, loud roar dying away into a rattling hiss, as the arms wrapped around him turn to coils and coils, tightening fast around him with enough force that he can hear an answering crack from one of his ribs. Juno’s eye meets a pair of cold reptilian eyes, and the beast lunges at him again, striking for his face. 

He brings one hand up to deflect the bite and feels the fangs sink into the meat of his arm, venom burning through his blood so fast the whole limb goes numb. With his other arm he holds on as tight as he can, feels the scales shift in his grip and holds on. 

“Come on,” Juno grunts, as the coils start to wrap around his neck. “That the best you’ve got?” 

The serpent hisses furiously, and shifts into a bird, wings flapping frantically in an attempt to break Juno’s grip, talons tearing at whatever they can reach. Juno digs his fingers into the feathers, and holds on tighter.

“You won’t take him back,” he shouts, as the beak misses his eye and pecks at his temple. “You gave him up, and he’s mine, and you can’t have him!” 

As if in answer, the feathers fall away and leave behind the shape of a man, who looks up at Juno with wonder in his familiar keen eyes and starts to let his lips shape Juno’s name before shuddering and going up in flames. 

Juno bites back a scream, and pushes past the searing pain of the fire blistering his skin and holds on, holds on, holds on.

His vision blurs with the flare of firelight, dark spots dancing over his field of view. Juno tugs Nureyev close with one arm tight around his neck and reaches around with the other, digging through his coat and fumbling for his million-to-one chance. 

“Got you,” he whispers, and lights the babylon candle. 

*

Safe behind their reinforced glass, the Solar Court watches the pair of distant, entwined figures flicker for an instant, and vanish without a trace into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: violence - descriptions of animal attack and injury, descriptions of suffocation
> 
>  
> 
> okay YALL the actual FIRST SCENE i ever wrote for this fic is. This chapter. Sometimes its just about knowing what you want and figuring out how to make it happen huh?


	16. 15. the beacon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juno pays a visit to an old friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: canon-typical descriptions of injuries

**[eight months ago. mars, 41.8237 N, 84.70 W.]**

This is nowhere. 

Someone very far from home staggers across the empty landscape, heading nowhere in particular. The sand is heavy and dry and sucks at his boots. On the horizon, a storm is brewing, dark hot clouds brimming with malevolent promise. 

The staggering figure does not know this, but he is one hundred and thirty-six miles from the nearest glimmer of civilization in any direction. If he makes good time, continuing in this direction, it will be a hundred and fifty miles away before nightfall. 

He turns to glower angrily at the line of clouds gathering behind him. One of his eyes spins strangely in his skull, the pupil shrunken to a black pinpoint. Unsightly markings radiate out from the epicenter of the iris, staining the white of his eye and the dark skin of his face with a strange pattern of necrotic bruising. 

The wanderer wraps himself tighter in his bloodstained trenchcoat, and turns back again, taking another step into the shifting sand. One hand reaches up to grasp at a thin silver chain winding around his throat, tugging at the iron pendant. 

“Next time you feel like running away from your guilt, Steel,” he mumbles to himself in a tired, dust-choked voice. “Know how to get there.” 

The wind whistles in reply, kicking up the first gust of a summer sandstorm. 

One hundred and thirty-six miles from everywhere, he stops and looks up to see the blue-white glow of an impossible lighthouse against the sand-streaked sky. 

*

**[now.]**

“It is good to see you again, Juno, although I would prefer to reunite under different circumstances once in a while.”

Juno groans without opening his eye, his whole body an insistent throb of pain the second he’s thrust into wakefulness. Jumping into the void of space leaves one hell of a hangover. “Yeah, I missed you too, Big Guy,” he grumbles. 

“I took the liberty of brewing you some tea. You are welcome.” 

Juno’s eye opens in a curious squint, and he stares through blurred vision up at the square-jawed and dark-eyed face of a man in a heavy and worn brown leather jacket. “Thought I was all out of favors.” His voice sounds thin and rasping to his own ears. 

“That is true,” the Other says, amicably. “This is not, however, a favor I am providing for _you._ ” 

With a herculean effort, Juno heaves his aching body something closer to upright. One of his arms doesn’t respond, pinned to his side with a sling and bandaged from shoulder to wrist. “Then who--”

“Boss!” a familiar voice shrieks, moments before a small, compact round shape flings itself bodily onto Juno’s lap and wraps around him in an embrace that squeezes all the air out of his lungs and leaves him gasping and swaying. “You scared the hell out of me, appearing out of thin air like that and dropping that fairy right on top of me without no warning. And you _know_ he wasn’t wearing _no clothes_ , Mistah Steel, I don’t know what you did to him and frankly I don’t wanna hear it but that’s no kind of workplace etiquette!”

“Rita--”

“And then you go and fall right on your face and don’t get up again, and blood everywhere and your hair smelling like smoke and your skin was all funny and cold, and boss, I just get so scared seein’ you like that, you _know_ I do--”

“Rita,” Juno croaks, shuddering. “Rita, where is he?” 

She pulls away, hair in a halo of unkempt loose coils all around her head, lower lip quivering slightly, and reaches up to wipe at her nose. “I...you mean Mistah N….uh...Lin? I think he was downstairs somewhere, last time I saw him? He was talkin’ with that lady with the red hair and her wife, I think they might’ve known each other from somewhere.” 

Juno breathes a long, shaky sigh, clutching tight to Rita’s arm. “He’s okay, then?”

She blinks, and nods, offering Juno a reassuring smile. “Safe and sound, boss. Not a scratch on him.” 

“I…” Juno slumps back into the pillows. “Oh.” 

He looks to the side and meets the Big Guy’s unflinching gaze, calm and steady enough to make a blush rise to his cheeks. His head aches and his neck twinges painfully with the effort of holding it up. 

“Aren’t you gonna ask where we are, boss?” she asks, expectantly. 

Juno, not wanting to disappoint her, settles in and urges her to tell the familiar tale of a magic lighthouse rising out of the darkness like a big bright beacon on a moon that she could have sworn didn’t exist a minute before, on account of their ship should have been about a million miles from the nearest planet, but there it was, anyway. She relates it with a familiar soap-opera gravitas and plenty of accompanying hand motions, and Juno fights a fond smile. He loses the battle, inevitably, but it’s an admirable attempt anyway. 

The Big Guy eventually notices Juno’s valiant struggle to keep his eye open and moves to stand. “Miss Rita,” he says, clearing his throat, “I believe we should leave your friend to his recuperation.”

Juno half expects a protest from Rita, who only nods and jumps up, reaching out to pat Juno on his bandaged hand. “You rest up now, boss. I promised Mistah Siquiliak I’d introduce him to Frannie!” 

“Who?” Juno grumbles, helplessly, so tired that his tongue can barely form the words. He spares a passing thought to mustering up an indignant huff a little later, once he puts together that Big Guy has a name after all, and Rita knows it. But he resolves fuzzily to voice his frustration once the cotton-wool fog of sleep lifts from his brain. 

* 

After another few days slowly cataloguing his aches and pains, Juno’s restless enough to crawl right out of his skin. He’s dodged enough questions for Buddy to give up asking, sipped at the Big Guy’s bitter, watery tea until he stopped hovering, even suffered a handful of quick, wordless examinations where Vespa prods at his cuts and bruises like she’s reminiscing about the last time she sunk a dagger into his gut. 

One notable absence, though, that Juno can’t help wondering about. You save a guy’s life and he all but disappears into thin air, what are you _supposed_ to think? 

He sees him around, though. Flashes of him, just enough to make him wonder if Vespa’s hallucinations are getting contagious now. A familiar voice echoing up the spiral staircase, faint but unmistakable. A glimpse of a dark-haired figure disappearing around the corner as he limps into the bar. 

It takes days to track him down, despite Juno’s best efforts, and when he does it’s more coincidence than anything. 

The start of it is the boredom, and a vague strain on the night air that means, in Juno’s experience, that someone’s left one of the radios on. He stares at the ceiling for long enough to recognize he won’t be getting back to sleep anytime soon, and then hauls himself to his feet by slow, lingering degrees. 

Music echoing down the hall, through an open window. Coming from above. 

Juno falters at the door, not wanting to interrupt if it means running into Buddy or Vespa, together or individually. But too curious, ultimately, to turn back now. It’s always been a character flaw of his.

The rooftop looks abandoned when he first steps out. It takes him a slow, shuffling walk out to the edge of the rail and a premature sigh of relief to realize there’s a misplaced shadow outlined against the beacon, just on the other side. 

Nureyev doesn’t flinch when Juno moves to join him. Doesn’t even shift his gaze from where it’s fixed, distantly, on the star-torn sky, though he gives Juno an almost imperceptible nod in greeting. 

Juno recognizes the yearning in his face, the unrestrained wonder in his dark eyes as he takes it all in. Knows a little more now about what it means than he did before, even if he can’t understand the full depth of it. 

“Oh. You’re still here,” he says, a little stupidly. 

Nureyev’s brow arches in response. “Mmm?”

“Just seemed like you’d jump at the chance to leave this all behind. I thought you’d be long gone by now. Off on the next grand adventure, swinging from star to star.”

He turns enough to cast his face in reflected light, gives Juno a long, quizzical look. “I...didn’t want to presume, I suppose. That you would be amenable.”

Juno’s shoulder throbs, and he rests his arm against the rail. “What is that supposed to mean?” 

Nureyev glances away, furtively. “Well, you needed your rest, and then it seemed there was never a good time to ask, and--”

“Ask? Me? Why the hell would you need my _permission_ , Nureyev, that makes no goddamn sense!”

“You--” he stops. “Ah.” 

“What?”

“I assumed you knew, Detective.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Juno groans, ducking his head low and clenching his jaw. Bracing for the punch. “Know what? What the hell don’t I know? Enlighten me!” 

When he speaks, Nureyev’s voice is soft and even. “You have my name,” he says, and then, halting, “In effect, dear, you have...me.” 

Juno considers this, and recoils. “Oh.”

“So, you see, where I go from here is really rather up to you--”

“No,” Juno blurts, stepping back from the rail with a violent shiver. “Hell no. Absolutely not, no.”

Nureyev is motionless and silent, his eyes flickering from Juno’s bandaged arm to his bruised face, his thin lips parted slightly. 

“Go wherever the hell you want.” Juno can’t hide the note of disgust in his voice. “I’m not--I won’t stop you.” 

He turns, walks back toward the door and the music box propped open beside it, wailing a discordant melody, and hears Nureyev say, flatly, “You’re sending me away.” 

Something in Juno’s chest aches sharply at that, and he reaches out to steady himself, braced against the doorjamb, head pounding. Because this is it, right? Where all that playing with fire was gonna get him in the end. Still in the dark, burned. He takes a sharp, unsteady breath, and tries not to think about what he’s losing, because it’s right. It’s the only choice he can make. 

And some things can only be taken when they’re freely given. 

“I...I’m giving your name back. To you. Because you should have it.” Juno turns back, heart in his throat. “Fair’s fair?”

Peter Nureyev is a beautiful, otherworldly mirage silhouetted against the star-streaked night, and any second now Juno is going to watch him fade away for the last time. Free, for the first time in twenty-one years, to make whatever choices he wants. 

But first, he steps forward, takes Juno’s face in his hands, and kisses him so fiercely that he feels like a supernova is erupting in the hollow cavity of his chest. Juno makes a muffled grunt of surprise, and then gives in, reaching out to pull him closer one more time before letting him go.

And still, he doesn’t disappear. 

“In that case,” Nureyev murmurs, soft like the first excited tremor of an earthquake. “Come with me?” 

He asks as though after Juno dove into the mouth of hell to save him there’s a single place left in the galaxy he wouldn’t follow, given half the chance. And he’s right. It should be a daunting prospect. Hell, it should be unthinkable. But Juno’s been on a daring streak lately. He holds on tight to the things he wants, and he doesn’t let go.

“I’d like that,” he agrees, and seals it with a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ooooh im gonna MISS writing this now that it's reached an endpoint huh....my little fic baby all grown up....
> 
> but WHILE i have you here! music!
> 
> 1\. a playlist of songs that went along with my writing process: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2lmKRIw9sN3HNmW3FCPqfs?si=KFvF81C0QiyODIkANK7X8g
> 
> 2\. my favorite and second-favorite versions of the tam lin child ballad which IS the backbone of this AU: 
> 
> tricky pixie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGDpQIwL3vI
> 
> anais mitchell : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3yTEUnyYDA

**Author's Note:**

> as always, i'm also active on twitter and tumblr @wastrelwoods, so...yell at me there too if you like?


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